Engineering Students’ Industrial Internship Experience Perception and Satisfaction: Work Experience Scale Validation

An essential aspect of higher education institutions’ academic curricula for engineering courses is the students’ industrial internship programs. In literature, it well accepted that such programs provide valuable learning outcomes and increase graduates’ employment prospects. Thus, paramount to evaluate programs’ quality identify opportunities improve their design implementation. However, evaluation typically depends on self-designed assessment surveys questionable validity. The purpose this paper assess perceptions experiences. For purpose, validation a recently adapted version Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) was carried out sample 447 students participated in offered by Portuguese public universities polytechnic schools. A confirmatory factor analysis performed confirm suitability model proposed WEQ’s authors study’s sample. psychometric qualities were evaluated through convergent discriminant results showed fit well, validity established. general competencies subscale most important participants—specifically, competency solving problems. Differences concerning WEQ gender, company size, compensation found discussed. This study provides researchers field with new tool validated explicitly students.