Vocational practice, including its entailing experiences, encourages the students to develop openminded and positive attitudes about working abroad within their fields of expertise. Because of this, the students also tend to positively increase their self-confidence and self-awareness during their internships. Their practical experiences are concluded in course-final presentations that receive feedback and recognition by spectating students and teachers. This also contributes to increased and broadened insights into how the vocational training program and the Swedish job market may correlate to that of other countries. The vocational training program can then incrementally approach the constantly changeable European job market and, over time, be adapted to the ever-increasing demands on work within the realm covered by the vocational training program.The students who complete the foreign internships, function as “deputy-hosts” at Kvinnersta when exchange students from abroad come to visit, and the practice of internships works as an important step in the process of preventing racism and xenophobia. During the process of job shadowing, staff members get the opportunity to discuss ideas and develop an understanding of a multitude of things such as: how people of other nationalities work with their students during activities, what sort of activities may be on offer, how they set appropriate boundaries for students, what the thinking is based on when constructing rental leases and many more aspects.
Kvinnersta has cooperated with host schools and businesses within the EU for many years, and offered vocational practice within many different departments, which greatly promotes and develops all vocational training as well as the schools in question, on many levels. Kvinnersta has also achieved an increase in goal attainment within its internationalization strategy with many students involved in the internship exchange, which has also brought a general increase in competency within the vocational training program. Furthermore, it has generated an increased number of intensified international relationships, in addition to a wider range of contacts. The increasing number of contacts enables greater possibilities as well as an increased interest among its participants in working abroad. The school basically wants to provide the students with safe and well-organized internship placements. Another ambition is to develop and intensify existing placements with key-competencies connected to animal production and husbandry, land use and cultivation, as well as forest management, since we believe this to be an efficient route to a deepening knowledge of the subject areas in question. This, in turn, is also likely to generate a quality increase of the vocational training program. Another ambition is to provide special needs-students (either on the special needs program, of regular students with various diagnoses such as ADHD) with equal opportunities to participate in foreign exchange internships in Norway, where they would be cared for and monitored by staff members who would provide security and assistance for the duration of the internships.