ENHANCING WORKPLACE LEARNING THROUGH STRUCTURED INTERNSHIP

Internship has been an integral part of engineering education globally to develop proficiency in professional knowledge and skills, as well as personal and interpersonal skills. The integrated learning experiences provided by internship helps to foster learner’s disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork and communication skills. Internship provides opportunity for learners to work on conceiving, designing, implementing, and operating (CDIO) engineering systems in a real-world context. In Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), internship is offered to all year-3 learners at the School of Engineering (SEG). There are two types of internship programmes, one with a duration of 12 weeks and the other with a duration of 24 weeks, and learners can carry out their internship in local or overseas companies or institutions. The Internship Framework at NYP undergone a major revamp to introduce Structured Internship in 2015. With this revision, a new set of clear and relevant learning outcomes were defined for the structured internship programmes. More 24-week internships were allocated for industry sectors requiring deeper technical expertise to be developed, and interns could benefit from structures workplace learning and project assignments. A study was conducted in year 2020 to evaluate the effectiveness of the revised internship framework, as well as to identify key internship design characteristics that enhance workplace learning. The results of the findings depict that the workplace learning experience has improved significantly since the revision, and that longer internship duration does enhance the intrinsic motivation of our learners. Graduate employment surveys conducted have also shown that workplace experience gained during structured internship has been useful for work and life after graduation. The study also identified top four factors impacting the success of structured internship, and they are “Able to learn and apply technical and soft skills,” “People they worked with,” “Task assigned is achievable” and “Industry Internship Mentor” respectively.