Internships are a form of "organized professional integration", structured at the interface between the educational and productive systems, where the school/university incorporates practical learning aspects within its educational program in order to prepare the socialization for work. In order to understand how these transformations are reflected in the process of joining the labor world, this study aims to analyze the professional integration of Management students into the labor market starting from their experiences as interns in Porto Alegre. A constructivist approach was adopted in the study. Interviews were held with 32 students from undergraduate courses in Management who reported their experience as interns and highlighting the implications for their professional integration and expectations for a future career. It can be seen from the analysis that, despite their educational characteristics, internships do not always represent the first step towards professional integration, since the interviews reveal that the students' first professional experience is not always related to their graduate course and is normally linked to the search for knowledge of the world of the labor or financial independence from the parents. Internships become of central importance, when the young people seek for professional experience related to their educational area. At this point, individual expectations have a notable influence, since in an institutionalized form of integration and within the same group young people various possible paths need to be taken into consideration. It can be seen that there is no single and generalist way of understanding this process, since a number of paths open up as a result of the internship experience, making the concept of professional integration even more difficult to comprehend.
Professional integration; Internship; Management; Labor market; Young adults
