As part of career guidance, the Faculty of Information at Bunkyo University encourages students to participate in internships at companies, and as part of this initiative, in 2023, the university began awarding credits for a “internship class” from the preparatory course. In the internship class, 30 students were selected from each of the three departments in the Faculty of Information Science, and we encouraged them to participate in as many internships as possible. The results of a questionnaire (22 respondents) given to the students after the class showed that the students had participated in an average of 4.7 internships at companies, and that 75% of the students who had participated in three or more internships had received early recruitment offers from companies. Furthermore, because of an additional survey conducted nine months after the end of the class, a significant difference was found in the timing of job offers between students who had participated in many internships and those who had participated in few internships. As the demand for IT personnel rapidly expands, the introduction of AI is also expanding, and companies are competing to recruit higher quality personnel. In this paper, we discuss the new role of universities that provide specialized education in the context of Japanese companies, which tend to prefer generalists for new graduates.

Keywords: Job Hunting Preparation, Internship, Number of Participating Companies, Time of Job Offer.