English Education Alumni’s Perception on the Employability Skills: Post Internship Experience

To develop graduates’ employability skills, that is a collection of hard skills and soft skills achieved by graduates, English Language Education Department (ELED) conducted internship programs. This study aims to find out graduates’ employability skills acquired by the students after participating in internships and how the employability skills support their future careers. Using a qualitative approach and descriptive qualitative research design, this research collected the data through semi-structured interviews with six participants. Based on the interviews, the first finding revealed that internships program in ELED equip students with three types of employability skills, namely 1) essential attributes; soft skills enables to form the self-productivity of the student's, 2) key transferable skills; skills that can be used or transferred into any work from one thing to another, and 3) highlevel transferable skills that enable the person to identify and exploit opportunities systematically (job-specific and team-working). In addition, the second finding shows that these employability skills support the participants’ careers as teachers by helping them to meet competency qualifications such as 1) building graduate pedagogy competencies, 2) improving their personality competence, 3) expanding their skills related to their social competencies, and 4) shaping their professional competence. The study implies that due to the importance of graduates employability to support students’ career, it is suggested for the ELED students to take internship more seriously.