Survey study demonstrates that mentorship and workplace demands shape engagement and burnout in engineering interns, highlighting the need for coordinated university-industry collaboration.
This study examined how university-related resources and industry-related demands jointly shape student engagement, burnout, and perceived outcomes in short-term vocational internships. Using the Study Demands–Resources (SD-R) framework, data were collected from 304 engineering students and analysed using PLS-SEM and the Cross-Validated Predictive Ability Test (CVPAT). Mentorship quality and organisational climate significantly enhanced engagement, whereas unclear learning objectives and time pressure increased burnout; task–skill misfit showed a small, marginally significant effect. Engagement strongly improved perceived internship outcomes, whereas burnout reduced them. A model comparison showed that an integrated university–industry model offered superior predictive accuracy for burnout and internship outcomes compared with single-domain models, although its advantage for engagement was not statistically significant. These findings extend the SDR framework to practice-based learning environments and highlight engagement and burnout as dual mechanisms linking contextual factors to competence development, employability skills, and career readiness. This study underscores the need for coordinated university–industry collaboration to optimise internship quality and support student development.
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Mappeasse et al. (2026) studied this question.
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