INTERNSHIP AS ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGIES: TALENT, TACIT KNOWLEDGE AND IDENTITY WORK IN MALAYSIA’S PRINTING INDUSTRY

This paper investigates how managers in Malaysia’s printing industry construct expectations of student interns and describe supervision, skill development, and cultural learning within placements. It addresses two questions: (RQ1) how managers frame interns’ roles and value; and (RQ2) how supervision practices mediate learning, identity formation, and cultural socialisation. A qualitative, interpretivist design was employed, using reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with five senior supervisors across established printing firms. Documentary sources (e.g. training manuals and university rubrics) provided contextual triangulation. Analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s six phases, with attention to reflexivity, audit trails, and credibility criteria. Five themes were developed. Internships were framed as hiring trials, privileging evaluation and risk management; harnessed creativity within constraints, welcoming “fresh ideas” while limiting autonomy; mastery of tacit craft, emphasising judgement, quality, and embodied know-how; symbolic labour for reputational repair, positioning interns as ambassadors for a “niche” sector; and hybrid professionalism, balancing automation with human discretion. Across themes, learning was acknowledged yet often subordinated to organisational imperatives. Managers’ preferences for longer placements appeared to diverge from university cycles, and supervision was narrated more as monitoring than mentoring. Recommendations include: (1) align placement duration with evaluative needs while protecting students’ developmental aims; (2) embed structured mentoring, feedback, and reflective tasks to support tacit learning; (3) co-design expectations and assessment with universities to reduce mismatch; and (4) make cultural and identity work explicit: preparing interns for reputational dynamics while ensuring fair workload, compensation, and progression. By focusing on a lower-status, technically intensive sector, the study extends internship scholarship beyond generic employability. It highlights internships as organisational, pedagogical, and cultural projects; sites where tacit craft is transmitted, reputations are repaired, and hybrid forms of professionalism are rehearsed. The analysis refines debates on placements as pipelines by theorising their symbolic and identity-forming functions.