Objective:

Identify and characterize the trends in research on internships in order to contribute to the academic debate regarding relevant and current problems associated with their development and as a strategy for labor market insertion.

Method:

The following article presents a systematic review of descriptive scope where we searched for publications between 2000 and 2020, related to the subject of professional practices, in the databases Redalyc, Scielo and Dialnet. Initially, of the total of 308 studies obtained, 64 empirical articles, systematized and approached from the thematic analysis, were filtered for their pertinence and relevance.

Results:

The following topics were found to be the most recurrent: competencies (21 %) and professional training (11 %), followed by identity (5 %), perception (5 %), university-business linkage (5 %), meanings (3 %), experiences, employability (2 %), contexts (2 %), representations (5 %), working conditions (2 %), mental health (2 %), precariousness (2 %), and finally, less frequently, collective memory (1 %), curriculum (1 %), bioethics (1 %), grouped in 4 tendencies. Regarding methodological designs, quantitative designs (45 %) were found to be more applicable, followed by qualitative (39 %) and mixed (16 %).

Conclusions:

The identification, characterization, and analysis of what has been researched on the subject of internships, allowed the recognition of the trends that have emerged in the studies, the recognition of the questions on the relationship between formation and professional application, as a future research approach for Organizational and Work Psychology, in a context of transformations in the world of work and its impact on the internship as a mechanism of labor insertion.

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