ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING, CORE-SKILLS ACQUISITION AND PUBLIC UNIVERSITY GRADUATES’ SELF-EMPLOYABILITY IN NORTH CENTRAL, NIGERIA
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Date
2020-01
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UNIVERSITY OF ILORIN
Abstract
The problem of unemployment and poverty occasioned by low university graduates employability has been of great concern to the stakeholders in education. Hence, the introduction of entrepreneurship training to enhance students’ acquisition of core-skills to enables universities to produce self-employed graduates. Thus, this study examined the relationship among entrepreneurship training, core-skills acquisition and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria. Other purposes includes: i. to investigate the relationship between vocational training and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria; ii. theoretical training and public university graduates’ graduates self-employability in North-central Nigeria; iii. practical training and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria; iv. vocational skills and pubic university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria; v. communication skills and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria; and vi. managerial skills and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria.
Descriptive research design was adopted for this study. The population of the study consist of 11 Directors of the entrepreneurship centers and all 50,957 final year students (400 level) in the universities in North-central Nigeria. Eight directors were selected and 382 (400 level) students were selected as sample for the study. There were two researcher’s designed questionnaires titled entrepreneurship training questionnaire (ETQ) to elicit information from the Directors on entrepreneurship training and core-skills acquisition questionnaire (CSAQ) designed to elicit information from the 400 level students. The validity of the instruments were ensured by given the instruments to the researcher’s supervisor and four other experts while Crumbach Alpha were used to ascertained the reliability of the instruments. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the three research questions while Pearson Product Moment-Correlation statistics were used to test the six operational hypotheses at .05 level of significance.
The findings were that:
i. there was significant relationship between vocational training and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria (r =2.27, p < 0.05).
ii. there was significant relationship between theoretical training and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria (r =2.12, p < 0.05)
iii. there was significant relationship between practical training and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria (r =2.19, p < 0.05)
iv. there was significant relationship between vocational skills and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria (r =1.79, p < 0.05)
v. there was significant relationship between communication skills and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria (r =1.96, p <0.05)
vi. there was significant relationship between managerial skills and public university graduates’ self-employability in North-central Nigeria ( r =2.59, p< 0.05)
The study concluded that upon all the investments and efforts in entrepreneurship training to ensure graduates’ self-employability, progress towards enhancing self-employability of public university graduates in North-central Nigeria seems little. Therefore, it was recommended among others that university administrators should partner with the community to lessen the burden of recruiting core-skilled personnel that can aid effective vocational training and managerial skills acquisition.
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING, CORE-SKILLS ACQUISITION, PUBLIC UNIVERSITY GRADUATES, SELF-EMPLOYABILITY, NORTH CENTRAL, NIGERIA