An exploratory study on interns' communicative abilities: The industrial internship experience

Communication skills, other than specialized technology competency is a competency valued by employers. Universities are accountable in providing adequate communication skills for graduates to prepare them to face the challenging and changing industry. This study investigates the communication skills (oral and written) of interns from a private engineering and technology focused university in Malaysia. For a more comprehensive perspective, two sets of questionnaires are used to gather data from the interns and their respective industrial supervisors. Overall, the findings indicate that the interns possess high communicative abilities both in oral and written. Although the mean scores suggest that the interns had rated their communicative abilities higher than their industrial supervisors, t-test results show no significant difference between the two groups of respondents. Interestingly, no significant difference is found between interns from different academic programmes. The findings of this study indicate that the university may have prepared and groomed its students adequately to meet the needs of the current industries. Explanations for the findings are discussed in relation to the university's intake requirements, course syllabus, and university-industry collaborative initiatives.