PROPOSAL OF GUIDELINES TO IMPLEMENT AND EVALUATE INTERNSHIPS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

In recent years, Portuguese Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have made efforts to increase the employment rate of their graduates, as a response to national and European political guidelines. A common strategy to achieve this goal is to offer study programs with internships, especially in Polytechnic Schools. By following this approach, HEIs also expect to increase the attractiveness of their study programs. This is particularly important for Portuguese Polytechnic Schools, which traditionally have more difficulties in capturing students.

In addition, study programs with internships provide an opportunity for HEIs to establish or reinforce partnerships with companies in the surrounding business sector, which, among other advantages, allows the alignment between course curricula and the skills required by the labor market. This is particularly important for Polytechnic Schools as their mission is to prepare high-skilled professionals with the ability to readily integrate the labor market.

In general, HEIs lack structures to support the evaluation, monitoring, and reflection about the internship processes or, when existing, that structures are, in most cases, more directed to manage the internship offers and the placement of students. Therefore, there is a real risk that process supervisors or department managers do not have access to valuable information to promote the continuous quality improvement of internships (e.g., suggestions from students and employers to improve the study programs). Furthermore, even if this information circulates, it is in an informal and non-systematized way.

This article presents the strategies that were followed in the implementation of internships in a study program in the ICT area of a Portuguese Polytechnic School. It also presents the results of a survey administered to a group of students and respective supervisors of the internship host entities. The main objective of this work was to contribute to the evaluation of the implementation process of internships in the aforementioned study program. Specifically, by applying this instrument it was intended to analyze the students and host entities opinions about the internship structure and the corresponding implementation strategies that were followed. Also it was sought to better understand the students preparation level for the internship. Finally, it was intended to better understand how important the internships are both for students and host entities, especially with regard to the establishment of a new contractual relationship.

The results of the survey show that both students and host entities are satisfied with the internships, both in terms of structure and students preparation for the execution of the internship. This is evidenced by the significant percentage of employment or collaboration proposals between students and the host entities where the internships were held.

Besides the importance of the results for the management of the undergraduate course addressed in this work, the proposed instrument and the strategies defined for the internship implementation can be useful to everyone involved in the evaluation and monitoring of internships of study programs concerning areas other than the ICT one.