The effects of internship abroad on engineering students' self-perceived employability

Internationalisation is seen as one of the means of enabling engineering students to acquire skills and attitudes and also promote their employability. In this study, we investigate the effects of a six-month internship abroad on self-perceived employability, by (1) observing the global effect of the internship abroad on factors related to self-perceived employability (SPE), (2) analysing the effects depending on demographic and organisation questions, (3) Verifying through clustering if the data can identify homogeneous groups of students based on SPE change and (4) predicting SPE positive change relating to the internship abroad. We conducted a quantitative study on SPE before and after the internship abroad, analysed sample homogeneity (clustering) and assessed the internship's role in SPE change using logistic regression. The results show that (1) Some factors have a high/low level of influence on SPE; (2) demographic and organisational factors do not affect SPE change; (3) two homogenous groups appeared in terms of SPE change (a positive group and a negative group); (4) only social integration support predicts positive change in SPE for engineering students. The SPE of engineering students seems to be linked to a wider range of perceived social support in their host country.