The effects of intern's former professional experience and GPAs on their received supervision

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate into how cognitive skills develop for interns during their placement and what factors make the internship a valuable tool for both the skill increase of the intern and the benefit of the recruiting firm. Approach – A microeconomic model will be developed based on cognitive skill acquisition theory and its predictions will be tested against an online survey. Findings – This paper finds out that interns receive more supervision when they have relatable previous experience, but only if their tasks during the internship are relatively complex. If their tasks are relatively routine, relatable previous experience has the opposite effect – it reduces the amount of supervision received. Another finding is that students receive increasingly more supervision effort from their coaches as the internship progresses. Implications – The specific findings on the organizational structure of internships can be of high value to both internship supervisors and participants. These findings shed a new light on a popular social issue – whether internships can be considered value-increasing for society. The link between organizational theory and cognitive science we make allows for a new perspective for the approach to examining internships – one that would allow for more general studies and communication between researchers.