IMPROVING THE CAPACITY OF TECHNICAL AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION PROGRAMMES IN TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS FOR ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS ACQUISITION AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Abstract The study determined ways for improving the capacity of technical and vocational education programmes in tertiary institutions for entrepreneurial skills acquisition and national development. Three research questions guided the study and three hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The descriptive research design was used for the study. The population of the study comprised 156 lecturers of Technical and Vocational Education from the tertiary institutions in Anambra State. Through the simple random sampling, 60 percent of the study population was sampled. Thus, the sample of study comprised 94 TVE lecturers in tertiary institutions in Anambra State. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire validated by three experts in education. The instrument was subjected to reliability testing through a pilot test on 10 technical and vocational education lecturers in Asaba, Delta State. The application of Cronbach Alpha reliability method on the obtained data yielded coefficient values of 0.78, 0.85 and 0.81 for the three clusters with an overall reliability co-efficient of 0.81. Mean, standard deviations and t-test was used to analyze the data. Findings revealed thatlecturers of technical and vocational agreed that technical, entrepreneurship, managerial, personal maturity, interpersonal and personal skills were required by TVE graduates for national development. Finding also revealed that lack of appropriate communication channel between technical and vocational education and industry, inability to involve established entrepreneurs in the education and training of TVE students, Poor funding of the TVE programme, poor infrastructural facilities that will help facilitate collaboration between the technical and vocational education and industry and lack of innovative leadership among administrators of TVE in tertiary institutions were the challenges affecting the capacity of technical and vocation education in tertiary institutions to effectively equip its graduates with entrepreneurial skills for national development. Finding further revealed that mapping out a comprehensive national entrepreneurship education promotion strategy, building capacity of TVE staff through network sharing platforms like seminars, workshops and conferences that will facilitate exchange of ideas, scaling up TVE collaboration with relevant stakeholders and involving guest trainers from different backgrounds to train students on entrepreneurial processes were strategies for improving the capacity of TVE for entrepreneurial skill acquisition and national development. It was therefore recommended that federal and state government should adopt a regulatory framework for the institutionalization of public private partnership (PPP) initiatives for technical and vocational education programmes in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. It was also recommended that diversification of funding for TVE programme through the utilization of innovative funding strategies like public-private partnership (PPP), philanthropic initiative, establishment of entrepreneurship development endowment fund in TVE