Provincial Directorate of Youth and Sports Employees’ Views about Field Experience in the Sports Management

The purpose of this study is to determine the views of employees who have the potential to become workplace superiors in PDYSs, one of the institutions responsible for sports management in Turkey, about field experience in sports management with regard to training and assignment variables. This is a descriptive research. Research group is composed of 155 PDYS employees. Data collection tool which was modified by Ross and Beggs (2007) in order to compare the views of the students and managers in recreational sports management internship, and later adapted into Turkish by ？oknaz (2014). 5 point Likert type scale is composed of 47 items. Cronbach Alpha internal consistency is .92. At the end of Kolmogorov-Simirnov test it is found that data is not distributed normally, and in the analysis Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis tests are used. Significance level is determined as 0.05. The comparisons revealed that statistically a significant difference was obtained in favor of the people who received sport education with regards to staff selection by the workplace, cooperation between universities and institutions, workplace image, and students’ problem solving skills. About the necessity of providing students with the opportunity of education, vocational development, work planning, etc. in the workplace of field experience, a significant difference was attained in favor of the people who received sport education; between managers and specialists, a significant difference was found in favor of specialists in education, vocational development, work planning and program management. About student abilities such as communication, human affairs, marketing, motivation and following instructions a significant difference was obtained in favor of the people who received sport education when compared with the people who did not receive education in sports related fields. Between specialists and managers, a significant difference was found in favor of the former in communication and human affairs in accordance with assignment variables; yet about students’ being ready to work more than 40 hours a significant difference was found in favor of the latter. It is essential to have workplaces inclined to improve students’ skills for a qualified field experience process. In this research, only the people who received sport education thought that field experience had to develop problem-solving skills. It might be necessary to create awareness about other skills. However, other results indicated that in PDYS, especially the people who received sport education and specialists were