ABSTRACT
Hospitality career education program is offered to train individuals to work in the vast sector of hospitality industry which demand a significant amount of young trained professional. Due to fast paced changes in the hospitality industry with great emphasis on employability skills, there is a need to determine the level of competencies that graduates in hospitality management program should possess before moving on to workplace. With the increasing number of hospitality graduates, questions have emerged regarding industry expectations pertaining to the generic managerial competencies. Do hospitality education programs adequately prepare their students with the employability skills? If not, can the program be improved or changed to meet the demands of the employers? What is at stake is significant or else, colleges and universities may be failing to prepare graduates to meet the demands and expectations of the industry (Robinson, 2006). The combination of theory with practical is viewed as an essential component in hospitality and tourism management education. Internship, which originated as apprenticeship and then evolved into academic based experience have long been regarded as important experiences. This
further raised a critical question whether there is any development in hospitality student’s management competencies before and after the internship program in order to measure the effectiveness of the internship program. However, limited attempts have been made to provide empirical support to claim that a practical internship experience develops management competencies in hotel and tourism students especially in Malaysia hospitality education context. This paper will investigate the contribution of internship in developing industry relevant management competencies among hospitality and tourism students.
