Internships are an impactful form of workplace learning that helps undergraduate engineering students acquire and enhance competencies to improve their employability. However, the nuances about what makes an internship successful are not well understood. Furthermore, learning during engineering internships has not been thoroughly researched.…

Professional learning is complex and is the result of a mix of experiences made in academic and workplace settings. An interesting step in the learning trajectories of professionals is represented by internship. Interns have to engage in boundary crossing when connecting academic learning with professional practices. An interesting issue to…

Internships are a distinct learning context, given that interns possess a blurred role status between student and employee. The distinctiveness of an internship, as a learning context requires investigation of which individual-level factors predict learning during internships and subsequently, how this learning impacts the acquisition of relevant…

Co-ops and internships complement students' classroom learning and constitute important contributors to the quality of engineering education. In light of Stephen Billett's affordance-engagement framework, we reviewed 30 selected empirical studies on undergraduate engineering students' co-op and internship experiences. From these studies, we…

A substantial literature already exists in international students' study experience, but since relatively less exploration has occurred into their involvement in work-integrated learning it was considered desirable to further develop what is known about this area. Still less is known about how organisational hosts of international interns regard…

We examine the challenges and emergent nature of learning during undergraduate internships. Much scholarly inquiry on the latter focuses on internship experiences within traditional professional domains such as medicine, teacher education, and other fields. There is less knowledge about undergraduate interns entering more fluid and recent work…

Background: Internships are highly relevant learning experiences for engineering students. However, such practice-based learning settings must be carefully designed to allow their learning potential to unfold. Purpose: Exploring the job demands-control-support (JDCS) model, this study aimed to investigate how job demands, job control, and social…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is widely recognised as significantly contributing to enhancing graduate employability. Empirical evaluation of its impact and value is often confined to work-based WIL (internships/placements/practicums), known to pose challenges with scalability and equitable access. Through the lens of experiential learning, this…

The aim of this study was to investigate the work-based internship experiences of eight student-coaches. This was particularly in terms of what precisely such coaches learned within the practical context, and how they engaged with unexpected situational events. The methods employed within the project included focus group interviews and participant…

Work-integrated learning programmes help students acquire professional acumen and provide opportunities for them to experiment with new aspects of self and identity. Twelve internship students were interviewed regarding their perspectives on how they think they learn about professionalism and the information sources they use. They describe how…

Women remain severely under-represented in engineering in Australia as in all Western countries. This limits the pool of talent, standpoints and approaches within the profession. Furthermore, this under-representation equates to restriction of the benefits of being an engineer mainly to men. Gendered workplace experiences have been found to…

Work-based learning and the inclusion of the world of work into tertiary students' learning lie at the heart of the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system. Traditionally this has been through apprenticeships and traineeships, which have a strong focus on "on-the-job" training, but also through "work-oriented"…

Currently, there is little research into how Western universities can establish and implement effective WIL (Work Integrated Learning) in their offshore campuses. Given global concern with university graduates' general work-readiness, combined with a need for foreign universities to deliver relevant outcomes to its offshore students, greater…

This article reflects on ongoing research-led teaching in the area of creative industries in higher education. Specifically it reports on key work-integrated learning strategies designed to better prepare graduates for the employment sector. The creative industries sector is complex and competitive, characterized by non-linear career paths driven…

In British social science degree programmes, methods courses have a bad press, and statistics courses in particular are not well-liked by most students. A nationally-coordinated, strategic investment in quantitative skills training, Q-Step, is an attempt to address the issues affecting the shortage of quantitatively trained humanities and social…