A Comparison of Students’ Part-time Jobs and Internships from the Perspective of Career Education: Case Studies from Local Private Universities

Abstract

With the current diversification and increase in internships, this research focuses on part-time jobs -which are both located on the periphery of internships and precede them - in an attempt to analyze the results of surveys with a focus on skills obtained from part-time jobs. The final goal of this research is to consider the possibility of utilizing part-time jobs in career education programs as either supplements or substitutes for internships by clarifying the skills students gain from both internships and part-time jobs. This paper focuses largely on the skills students gain from part-time jobs. The results are as follows. First, the results show that the majority of students’ part-time jobs consist of 3 types of operations beginning with food and drink, distribution-retail and retail-services. We can say that these types of operations employ non-regular staff (including those working in part time jobs) as a staffing strategy. Next, it was confirmed that with many distribution-retail and retail-services, there are several connections between part-time jobs, internships and employment locations. While we can say that the connections between these three are the same in large classifications, they differ in detailed classifications. The skills that students obtained through part-time jobs in the types of operations highlighted in the results of surveys consist largely of both human skills and conceptual skills, with the results showing a particularly large number of keywords relating to communication. It was confirmed that these skills are necessary for work and that they are the main skills which students learn from part-time jobs. Finally, some cases were also confirmed in which students could only gain experience of skills through either part-time jobs or internships.