Student interns performance and competency: An employer based evaluation

Internships are integral part of many professional degree programs. It allows students to link their professional training with their classroom education. Internships enhance the students’ knowledge of the content, allowing them to contribute to the welfare of the community and achieve their career goals” (Simons et al., 2012, p. 325). It also introduce students to the world of work and skills needed for them to do well in their future careers and connect practical experiences to the classroom to exhibit the relevance of their learning. This study aims to assess the student interns’ performance and competency based on the evaluation made by the respective employers or immediate supervisors of the student interns of the Bachelor of Science in Accounting Technology of the College of Business Entrepreneurship and Accountancy of Cagayan State University, Andrews Campus. This study made use of the descriptive research method using the student's evaluation tool in their internship. The student's evaluation tool is the one utilized by the employers or immediate supervisors to rate and assess the performance and competencies of the student interns which are utilized by the researcher to gather the needed data. The respondents of this study were 120 BSAT student interns who had undertaken their internship Summer of 2018. Random sampling was used by the researcher in obtaining the results. The data gathered were tabulated, analyzed and interpreted using the descriptive statistics like frequency counts, rank, percentage and weighted mean. To test any significant difference in the evaluation of the employer on the student interns’ competency, t-test was used. The research was therefore conducted and as seen from the result employers of the BSAT interns were fully satisfied on the performance and that they have assessed that the interns are competent in all categories namely personal traits, skills performance, work qualities and office management techniques. It is further seen that from the category mean of 4.66, employers were impressed much on the categories personal skills and work qualities of the BSAT interns. In the light of the foregoing findings, it is strongly recommended that the students should maintain their excellent performance and strive to become successful in their career and must be evaluated based on the specific performance that they should learn during their internship training while the agency or office concerned should revisit the existing students’ evaluation tool to address the current trends to properly assess the performance of the student-interns and include variables on employability skills to assess the readiness of the interns to face the world of work and similar studies should be conducted to investigate other variables to make interns more competitive and future ready.