Do women have a career identity?: A study to investigate the influence of a managerial summer internship experience on the career identity of female management students

Abstract

Career is an important part of a person’s life. Increasingly, it is being found that women are planning their lives with their career as their focal point and India is not an exception to this trend. Thus, there is an increase in the interest in studying the process which an individual employs to arrive at his/her career path, especially career oriented women. A career identity is a structure of meanings in which the individual links his own motivation, interests and competencies with acceptable career roles.1 A typical graduate student has a vague idea as to what s/he wants to pursue in the future but the need to complement the existing capabilities to boost up the opportunities as well as personal growth stays. This unmet need coupled with dissatisfaction and stagnation in the current job profile essentially motivates one to pursue a business or a management diploma sometime in their lives. An important aspect of pursing a management diploma is the summer internship which plays a very important role in the career decision making process of the management students. Management students generally spend a summer working in a corporate firm in the role of an intern to get a feel of the real world business and management life. In this study, we have tried to understand the influence that summer internship has on the development and enhancement of career identity of a female management student.