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offer a more visible strategy for providing support and encouragement for learning at work.
Examples are supporting participation calling for mentors and or supervisors (Rola-Rubzen &
Burgess, 2016). Burgess et al., (2018) maintains that the workplace may give more value to the development and learning of developing practices compared to others. Kolb (1984:38) identifies learning as a cyclic process and in his own words, “Learning was the process whereby knowledge created through transforming the experience.” A four-stage learning cycle is Kolb’s experiential learning style theory. The learner reaches “all the bases, the concrete and active experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.” Although this model has many critics (Fenwick, 2001a; Jarvis & Parker, 2005; Carvalho & Rahim., 2017), other versions of this prototype have shaped revolutionary pedagogical practices in HRIs, for example, work-based learning, showing the participant with experience. They often report these methods as action learning (Lin & Chen., 2017; Schon, 1995). The two strategies involve more or fewer items such as planning, action, evaluation, and reflection (Yorke., 2006). The work of Merchant et al., (2014) explains learning from the reflective action and the notion of reflection as fundamental to professional practices in the workplace. Action and although linked to continuing professional learning.
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explaining (un)successful liaising causes, for example, the construction and data formatting of internships is almost absent.
One of the most repeated authoritative declarations about internships is that they add something extra to make more intense or better the professional intromission of graduates in the labour market. I accept internships as a mechanism that helps students’ transfer from higher education to work (Weiss, Klein & Grauenhorst 2014; Jackson, 2015). However, this reasoning calls for further examination. First, on assessing contributing internships to improve using graduates and on testing the impingement of internship experiences on the graduate’s early career employment are non-existent. Only the views of students and employers’ grounds for the gains of internships (Sivasomboon, 2017). Second, little empirical evidence dated before the year 2000 needs to be updated after the post-Bologna Bachelor’s degree (Mason et al., 2014). Third, there is a notion that research on mediating causes, such as the learning experience about the way internships are organised and the timing experienced by the students who have planned for their personal development are in conflict. In the literature on internships, I have not seen the role of third parties or intermediaries, for example, the Employers’ Associations and other organisations.
There is an absence of their role in helping WIL between the three stakeholders: employers, universities, and students which makes up a gap in the literature.
This study tries to discuss gaps above, by examining the relationship between internships and graduates’ employability, specifically, the interrelated issues of internships on graduates’
unemployment levels before and after their participation in internships.
To summarise, re-examining the literature there is a gap in the knowledge on internship and employability which the researcher would try to clarify. They highlight the mismatch between expectations of companies and graduates and the mismatch between completion of internship and underperformance when starting the first job (Prikshat et al., 2018). There is also a lack of empirical grounds affirming the gains gathered for graduates’ employability skills (non-technical skills) after completion of internships. The knowledge associated with graduates and employers’
views of internship and employability is an important gap in business school education. I schedule this to arrive at the account of graduate perspectives of employability. Searchers of this research engines identified no reference to a graduate voice in the employability debates. The researcher hoped to study the graduates’ experiences during their internship and their qualities in the workplace (CEDA, 2015). This literature review has made more visible both what is
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experienced in this workplace/university and the data I neglected, thus showing that the body of literature is not complete.
The chapter ended with the gaps found in the current literature on internships and employability.
Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework which will be used for the study.
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CHAPTER THREE
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 3.0 Introduction
In Chapter Two, I presented literature on the nature, value, and quality of internship and employability. Further, I showed the fundamental concern around these phenomena and focused on higher education institutions, graduates, and employers. The literature perused provided me with a more holistic notion of the phenomena under investigation. It has shown the shift in research from what graduates do to what they know, and what informs this learning (Billet, 2011). Also, I established that graduates’ philosophical theory of knowledge (epistemology) has developed over time and in different spaces.
The focus of this research was to explore the relationship between the internship and employability. There has been a plethora of research examining internship and employability as a separate identity and several diverse theories and models have been used to establish frameworks in which to view internship and employability of graduates. Hence in this chapter, I present some of these theoretical perspectives and models intending to show the range of theoretical perspectives that had influenced the field of internship and employability. Having presented these varying theoretical perspectives, I select two theoretical perspectives as my theoretical framing of this study and show how and why these were appropriate to guide the study process, including the presentation of the data, the analysis of the data and the theorising of the findings. I have thus selected the transfer of learning theory and the experiential learning theory for this study