Perceptions of engineering students on industrial training in Malaysia

Abstract

Industrial training or internship is an important part of a study program for an engineering student in all universities in Malaysia. This research explores the students' perception of their experience in industrial training, which includes the management of the industrial training at the universities, self-change, future career development and readiness to be an engineer. A questionnaire was given to 88 third-year engineering undergraduates from one public university and one private university, who had just undergone industrial training. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results show that the engineering students had moderate levels of perception on all the categories, except future career, which showed a low level of perception. This meant that they believed that industrial training had not given them the confidence that they will be able to obtain the future career they want in engineering. Another interesting finding of the research, through a correlational analysis (p < .05), shows that the longer the duration of industrial training, the higher the readiness and future career development among the engineering undergraduates. This may indicate that there is a need to lengthen the duration of industrial training during the study where the popular duration currently in most of the public universities is 10-12 weeks.