Influence of a Co-op Program on Participants’ Academic Performance, Employment and Job Performance: Focusing on the Case of KOREATECH

Abstract

KOREATECH has operated a Co-op program called ‘Industry Professional Practice (IPP)’ that allows students to work full-timein relevant industries for at least four months since 2012, and also developed a systematic performance evaluation model on thebasis of Kirkpatrick’s four-stage assessment model. This study aims to share KOREATECH’s Levels 3 and 4 evaluation resultswhich are clearly what practitioners and academic investigators of cooperative education want to know the most. For this purpose,a questionnaire survey was conducted for KOREATECH graduates and their superiors to examine influence of IPP experienceson employment and job performance. A total of 730 alumni who graduated within last 5 years participated in the survey, with 213(29.2%) having IPP experiences, and 162 superiors rated their subordinates on seven performance criteria. The analysis results weremixed. On the one hand, employment rate of IPP participants was 89.7%, compared to 86.8% of alumni without field experiences. Participants of the IPP program were more satisfied with their salary and felt less unfair about their career and promotion opportunitiesthan alumni without field experiences. On the other, superiors rated their subordinates without IPP experiences slightly morepositively than IPP participants in terms of job performance. These contrasting results are judged to show strengths and weaknessesof the IPP program at the same time. The limitations of the study and future research directions are discussed at the last part.