[Re]thinking internship for Business Administration students during their professional training: a study about the Brazilian scientific production

Abstract

Facing the new requirements that have been demanded from higher education (offering a training consistent with the constant changes in the labor market), the role of the university in vocational training for students (preparing the students to act as professionals, creating the conditions to integrate them, without major difficulties, to the labor market), the importance of internship experiences (supervised or not) in the training of Business Administration students, and, above all, the need to expand the discussion about this subject, this article aims to analyze the current situation of the academic studies about Management internships in Brazil. For that, a bibliometric survey was carried out in the SPELL database and in the annals of ANPAD, Semead and CIGU events. We chose Bardin's exhaustiveness rule (2011), not defining an a priori period for data collection. Thus, 30 articles were retrieved, of which 28 were considered valid to compose the corpus of this study. The conclusions reveal that, even in the face of the importance of this practice for the professional training of the Management student, there is a fragility in the studies addressing the internship in this field in Brazil: the theoretical discussion about internship, from a pedagogical point of view, is fragile, too recent, and without meaningful advancements to the field.