Importance Of Internship In Hospitality And Culinary Arts

1. Introduction

Every single educational hospitality institution all over the world nowadays stress on the importance of practical training, and make efforts to develop internship programme for the students. Internship plays an important role of maintaining the growth of tourism development and keeping the good quality of human resources to meet the overwhelming industry requirements continuously. To shorten the gap between student’s academic experience and the requirements of employers, schools that provide hospitality, tourism and culinary art courses develops internship programs for students to take part and feel the experience lively.

Together with effort made by Taylor’s University, internship has become a compulsory program to go through during higher educational level in almost all hospitality, tourism and culinary arts programs in Malaysia. There are many positive effects for all stakeholders by forming a triangular partnership between schools, students and industry. Internship can be considered as a great opportunity for students. With good performance and ability shown they are able to continue their working contract in the future. Besides that, the

In Malaysia we found that some education institutes for hospitality, tourism and culinary art provided students good lecturers to teach operational concepts and knowledge but didn’t pay much attention on student’s skill development. Because of that, it is obvious that fresh graduates from those institutions are handicapped by a lack of technical skills and workplace experience. They are not able to handle when problems occur, all the new exposure will encounter reality shock when they join the industry after graduation and could make them leave the industry