Abstract:

The internship has been an essential part of professional education for hundreds of years - apprenticeship is still a valued form of the teaching profession. Not being too important as an integral part of higher education in bachelor and master programmes, this trend is rising, not decreasing. Although nowadays, almost all vocational and higher education institutions offer "labour market-oriented" and "professional" skills for the students, the potential of internship as a study method is not fully used. In 2015, the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and Innove Foundation launched a programme, "Development of Vocational and Higher Education for the Needs of the labour market." One programme aim was to develop the quality of provided internship programmes by the universities and vocational schools.
Within this programme mentioned above, a group of experts initiated 2018 the project of Recognition of the Internship system in Vocational and Higher Education to harmonise the quality of the implementation and development of the internship systems in creating the framework for quality assessment and further improvements. Most Estonian HEIs and vocational schools participated in the programme during the five years, and more than 100 study programmes were assessed. The present article aims to show how participation in the recognition process has changed the quality of the internship programmes and the impact of the self-and external assessment on the actual results. The impact was assessed based on the change of KPIs set by the schools themselves to assess the quality of the internship, as well as according to the qualitative opinion of the internship coordinators. The results show that the programme had a significant positive impact on the chosen internship key performance indicator as well as the coordinators evaluated the programme to be supportive in improving the internship systems and results.

Keywords:

Internship, quality assessment, vocational education, recognition process.