Abstract:

Internships are an increasingly significant entry point to formal employment. In careers with constrained talent pools, organizations need to understand more about the predictors of highly skilled graduates' intentions to transition from their internship status to full-time employment. There is a great deal of research and popular writing offering advice to job seekers who wish to transition from internship contracts to full-time employment contracts, but little that helps organizations understand how best to retain interns that they want to employ. This study applied the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to analyzing intern-to-full-time employee conversion decisions through its three core predictors of behavioural intention (attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control). Interns from three organizations completed an online survey (N=210). The study's findings confirmed the usefulness of the TPB in understanding intern conversion intentions, with the TPB predicting 65% of the variance in conversion intentions. Subjective Norms and Attitudes were significant predictors. This finding provides organizations with actionable insights to influence conversion rates strategically. We present these findings, along with a set of suggested future research projects.

Keywords:

Internships, conversion intention, the theory of planned behaviour.