Assessing employers’ perceptions towards internship students / Mas’udah Asmui ... [et al.]

With the opportunity to gain brief job experience in several academic subfields, internship programs are becoming increasingly significant for students from a variety of academic backgrounds. The organisations where students are placed provide them with opportunities for career exploration, self development, and learning new skills. This study seeks to investigate the descriptive of employers’ perceptions and work performance together with determining the relationships between independent variables and dependent variable among internship students. Internship students from bachelor’s degree program in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Pahang Branch took part in this study. A total of 156 students in majority are females and are of Malay ethnics. They choose to undergo internship at private sector organisations mostly where monetary reward is promised. The employers’ perspective towards students is high. Independent variables: work ethics are perceived as the highest value, followed by ICT competencies, communication competencies and cognitive abilities. Meanwhile, dependent variable; work performance is found to have a very high mean score. The relationship between employers’ perceptions and work performance is indicated as very strong and significant. Therefore, the null hypotheses were rejected, and alternative hypotheses are accepted. This study is believed to provide a huge significance to university, industry, government and students on variety of aspects including graduate employability rate.