Internship 101: Preparing to Enter the Workforce
High school students in Hawaiʻi are not always able to stay home here in Hawaiʻi because of the cost of living among other issues like finding a job in their field of interest. Island Pacific Academy wants to help their students and alumni to stay home or come back home with opportunities for them to work. Without proper education, many of these students and alumni end up going for what’s easiest and give up hope in terms of being able to make it work. Living in a state that has a high cost of living poses problems when it comes to being able to pay rent, let alone save to buy a house eventually. Knowledge of what an internship is, what you need to attain an internship, resume building, and the different career paths is essential for students and alumni to create a plan for their future.
An online course introducing internships, resume building, and the various career paths provides several benefits, offering flexibility and accessibility. Online learning platforms also incorporate multimedia tools such as videos and interactive activities that can help them apply for internships while simultaneously building upon their skills. Research shows that close to two-thirds (64.8%) of employers reported that they use skills-based hiring practices for new entry-level hires. Further, skills-based hiring practices appear to be relatively pervasive, with more than half of employers using these practices always or most of the time in their hiring process. (NACE, 2025)
Purpose:
Internships 101: Preparing to Enter the Workforce is an online course that prepares students for a successful transition into the career path of their choosing. This course was created for students who are interested in getting a head start on their journey into adulthood and would like to solidify a career path sooner rather than later. As students start to apply to colleges and think more about what degree they would like to pursue, the hope is that they can utilize this course in a way to help them move forward in their decision-making. This course is suggested for juniors who have started working with their college counselor and seniors who are starting to turn in college applications. The expectation is that these students have a general degree/career path in mind before starting this course. This is for Island Pacific Academy students. The school wanted to have something that could be useful in preparing the students more for adulthood.
The development of this course will be through Google Classroom, which will also incorporate other Google Suite products such as Google Slides, Docs, and Drive. There will also be videos included through YouTube or MP4 recordings. Nearpod will also be utilized to have a more interactive way to present the information to the students. Kahoot! and FigJam will also be utilized to have interactive activities throughout this distance learning course. Through a mix of cognitivism and constructivism, the students will be able to learn more about Internships, find and build upon skills, and go out into the real world at the end of the course to experience a career hands-on. Through Bloom’s Taxonomy, students will work through six different learning objectives that directly relate to course content, activities, and assessments. In the early development, it is very apparent that the stakeholders and subject matter experts didn’t know exactly what they wanted, making development a little slower than preferred.
Alexandra Murphy (Alex), LTEC Student, University of Hawaiʻi, US
Alexandra Murphy (Alex) is an Education Specialist at Hawai’i Pacific Health and has been since January of 2023. She creates, edits, and reviews modules, student groups, and assignments for 80+ courses for all of HPH’s staff. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Public Administration with a focus in Healthcare Administration. She really enjoys working on these modules and helping our healthcare system keep up with continued education. The passion that she feels in creating educational materials has also extended to working with the Medical Librarian on projects for the future Nurses of HPH. Through the LTEC program she also has been able to help her high school, Island Pacific Academy, with creating learning materials for their advisory curriculum. She hopes to continue on this work so that future high school students can find their passions and set themselves up for success when entering adulthood. By creating these online modules it has provided an innovative way for the students to receive and complete self paced learning to support them in their future endeavors and interests.
