Abstract:
The gap between academia and industry has become a major challenge for students, educational institutions, and organizations. Many students complete their academic studies without gaining practical industry experience, while companies often struggle to identify skilled graduates before they enter the job market. In addition, Final Year Projects (FYPs) are frequently developed for academic purposes only and have limited connection with real industry needs. To address these challenges, BridgeIT: Digital Internship Portal for Student Placement was developed as a centralized web-based platform that connects students, faculty members, industry professionals, and administrators. The platform enables companies to post internship opportunities, freelance projects, and industry-based Final Year Projects. Students can browse and apply for projects, monitor their application status, communicate with industry professionals, and receive feedback upon project completion. Faculty members can review and approve FYP proposals, monitor student progress, and provide academic supervision, while administrators manage users, projects, and overall system activities. The system was developed using the Incremental Development Model and implemented using PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript, and XAMPP. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) was implemented to ensure secure access by providing different permissions to each user according to their role. The developed platform successfully provides a single environment for industry-academia collaboration by integrating internship management, project collaboration, FYP supervision, communication, and feedback into one system. BridgeIT improves practical learning opportunities for students, simplifies project supervision for faculty members, and enables organizations to identify and recruit talented students before graduation. Overall, the proposed system contributes to reducing the gap between academic learning and industry requirements while enhancing graduate employability and collaboration between universities and the IT industry.
