Assessing the Role of 21st Century Skills on Internship Outcomes in a Steel Multinational Enterprise.

Internships prepare students for the workplace by giving them opportunities to develop relevant skills. The Committee on the Assessment of 21st Century Skills of the U. S. National Research Council (NRC), the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), has been developing definitions of workplace skills enabling individuals to face 21st Century challenges. In 2010 the Committee defined three categories of skills underpinning a broad range of jobs: cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The goal of this paper is to identify the NRC 21^st Century skills that are related to measured internship performance outcomes. The three outcomes we studied are execution of the internship main tasks, learning task-related new knowledge, and overall internship performance. The subjects for this study include interns, participating in a Mexican National Internship Program from summer 2006 to summer 2010 working at a multinational enterprise in the global steel industry, Ternium Mexico. Intern performance data had been collected using a unique instrument that was developed to evaluate the professional performance of the full time employees of the firm. A general model of internship outcomes was created using the three categories of 21^st Century skills. Linear regression was used to predict main task and learning performance internship outcomes, and ordered logistic regression was used to predict overall internship performance. The results confirmed that (1) cognitive intelligence or technical skills are necessary but not sufficient for success in executing professional tasks and (2) certain interpersonal and intrapersonal skills were also significantly associated with better professional performance as an intern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]