Internship Crafting: Transposing the Concept of Job Crafting for Students Undertaking Work-Integrated Learning

This paper proposes internship crafting as a strategy for addressing a range of challenges encountered by students, host organizations, and educators involved in the planning and undertaking of internships. Challenges include work that lacks relevance to students' aspirations, host organizations' difficulty in judging the amounts and types of work to provide, and educators' uncertainty regarding how to support the required negotiations. Internship crafting is explored as an opportunity to position students as active agents in the design of their internship experiences. The concept draws on the idea of job crafting, by which employees proactively co-design their tasks with colleagues and superiors to better align their strengths and interests with the needs of their organizations, for mutual benefit. Transposing job crafting onto internships creates a framework with the potential to empower students to co-design their internship experiences to advance both the needs of their host organizations and their own professional growth. [Paper presented at the Australian Collaborative Education Network (ACEN) conference (Melbourne, Australia, 2022).]