Today’s young graduates deal with many challenges. One of them is transition phase from education to the labor market and the unsustainable high youth unemployment rate in many EU countries.

On the other hand, employers greatly value work experience. That is the reason why early work experience such as internships, apprenticeships and traineeships are useful to simplify youth access to job market.

According to economic theory, we expect that student internships will have positive wage return.

Based on human capital theory, the additional skills, knowledge and competencies accumulated during the internship result in higher pay “if the time spent on an internship is more rewarding than the time spent studying” (Saniter, Siedler, 2014).

Signaling theories suggest that “employers' hiring decisions are made under uncertainty since the productivity of potential workers is unknown” (Saniter, Siedler, 2014). Young people that are looking for a job may therefore use internships and upon completion of the internship ask for providing of positive reference letters to signal high ability, which may result in improved job matching and higher earnings.

Screening theory foresees that firms use such indicators to more precisely assess workers' hidden productivity.

Social capital theory also predicts that internships ensure positive labor market returns because of the opportunity they provide to create relationships with potential employers and co-workers. These social ties can lead to better jobs after graduation.

Policy makers should be able to look into the statistical database published in the virtual platform, where the results of the output questionnaires of interns will be processed and sorted by the agro-food industry sector, by schools, by company. Policy makers can perform their analyses, whether the students who participated in the internship subsequently found a better job than those who did not participate in the internship, whether they are after graduating employed in the company, in which they participated in the internship, or at least in that sector, whether they receive higher wages or better jobs than those who did not have an internship, etc.