The challenges of establishing an internship program: policy, expectations and workloads

Government and employers alike are expecting universities to provide work ready graduates who have the professional skills necessary to seamlessly transition into the workplace. Providing students with the authentic learning experiences required to acquire these skills is an ongoing challenge for universities both in Australia and across the globe. Swinburne University who already has a long and proud tradition of offering work integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for its undergraduate students has recently expanded its range of WIL programs in an attempt to meet the changing expectations of Government and students. This has led to the Faculty of Business and Enterprise at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne to reassess the programs it offers and investigate new options. Evaluating and developing a WIL program from the ground up is a challenging and difficult task. New programs not only need to be sensitive to student learning needs but also meet a plethora of complex government and university policies and administrative requirements. Adequate resourcing, accreditation, the new subjects' relationship to existing programs, curriculum design, staff capacity and capabilities, recruitment, along with marketing and discipline specific requirements must all be considered. This paper explores the challenges faced by the Faculty of Business and Enterprise as it investigates the feasibility of establishing a 'credit bearing' internship program to be undertaken in an industrial or commercial setting. The research approach adopted was qualitative in nature with data acquired from a range of stakeholders in order to obtain views from a wide variety of perspectives. A number of student focus groups, comprising both local and international students, were conducted along with interviews of academic staff, and employers from various professions, some of whom were involved with internships and those who were not. The paper discusses the various challenges that have been identified through the project and makes suggestions about how to develop internship opportunities with due recognition of competing demands and expectations.