Commercial high schools have been promoting experiential and practical forms of training, such as selling goods, in their education for a long time. The Ministry of Education’s official guidelines for instruction have recently been putting special emphasis on “securing opportunities for work experience,” making internship look like the center of education for commercial high school students. However, practice in selling goods is an important component of learning for commercial high school students with its specific purpose and goals, even though it is less widely practiced than internship. This article will examine internship and business training and their respective effects through responses to questionnaires given to students in two commercial high schools who have had both types of work experience. The aim is to determine which is more desirable, the coexistence of two kinds of work experiences or their integration into a single program, on the basis that the two have similar effects. According to the questionnaire data I have collected, there are significant differences in four categories. The prominent merit of internship is that it gives students a more specific idea about their future careers, whereas business training characteristically makes students realize the importance of achieving specific goals through teamwork and cooperation.

Focusing on the relationship between members of society and students that was formed during an internship, this study investigates how relationships with others influence students’ career choices. A semi-structured interview was conducted with the survey subjects, and the portions regarding relationships and career choices were extracted and analysed using a revised version of the grounded theory approach （M-GTA）. As compared with other aspects, such as observation of a workplace, working with members of society and students and support from society, a strength and a sense of values, was observed, which influenced career choices. The process through which a strength and a sense of values are clarified and through which career choices change owing to relationships with others is similar to self-analysis during job-hunting activities as well as to process of industry and institutional research. Results indicate that, by developing ‘self-awareness’ as well as an understanding of ‘one’s workplace and vocational capability’ and ‘the attitude and effort required to commit’, students’ career choices after internship change to ‘re-selection, expansion of choice, change of choice, confusion of choice and first choice’.

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.