Investigating Key Issues Causing Ineffectiveness of Students’ Internship Programs in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry
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Abstract
The study attempts to explore the major issues causing the ineffectiveness of students' internship programs in the hospitality and tourism industry. The internship program has been recognised worldwide as a high-impact practice that provides students with the knowledge, practical skills, desirable attitude, and behaviours. However, the most previous studies mainly revealed its benefits. By looking at issues, most of the existing studies represented them from a specific party’s side, either intern students or business operators. Therefore, this study presents the issues derived from major triparty on the students’ internship programs: students, educational institutions, and business operators. Furthermore, integrative literature review analysis from the secondary data is used to synthesize key issues affecting the hospitality and tourism students' internship program. In this manner, eight primary issues that lead to the ineffectiveness of internship programs in the hospitality and tourism industry are found. It includes 1) poor working conditions, 2) lack of effective monitoring system, 3) perceived as cheap labour, 4) unsupported social working environment, 5) ineffective supervision, 6) inadequate academic and attitude preparedness, 7) no/low pay and compensation, and 8) unclarity of assigned tasks. In addition, the study also proposes some actionable suggestions to overcome these issues and potential future research directions related to this topic.
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