Does the Hotel Internship Improve Students' Intention of Employment in the Hotel Industry?

Abstract

The internship is an important means for students to improve their theoretical cognition, understand the development of the industry and clarify their future learning direction. The internship has become an important part of teaching in Higher Education Institutions, and it is also a task that students must complete to obtain an academic certificate and degree certificate. In order to improve the professional skills of the staff and the efficiency of staff recruitment, the hotel also actively establishes partnerships with universities to establish internship bases and hire interns with the expectation of retaining these interns for future employment at the hotel industry. In this research, 118 students who have finished their internship were selected for investigation and study. These students had a six-month internship in four-star or five-star hotels in Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou, Jinan, and so on. This research studies the factors affecting students' internship satisfaction by employing questionnaires. The findings of the study showed that the interns were very dissatisfied with the internship salary, labor intensity, night shifts, space for job advancement, and the society's attitude toward hotel attendants and that the students' employment intentions in the hotel industry were very low after the internship. This study argues that hotels should increase students' internship wages, appropriately reduce labor intensity, reduce the times of night shifts, give students the chance of priority promotion, and give them more humanistic care to improve the employment rate of hospitality management students in the hospitality industry and achieve sustainable development of human resources in the hospitality industry.