GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship education is the type of education that equips its recipients with the necessary competencies to discover and exploit markets or ideas in order to become job creators, following the upsurge of unemployment especially of the literates. Despite the various entrepreneurship development programmes adopted by the government, graduates are faced with inadequate entrepreneurial skills in Nigeria. Hence, this paper examines entrepreneurial skills development programmes, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) graduates entrepreneurial skills acquisition and the challenges facing acquisition of entrepreneurial skills in Nigeria. The findings of the study revealed that TVET has great potentials for graduates’ skills acquisition for self-reliance and employment. The study further revealed that TVET is facing the challenges of acute shortage of competent TVET educators, infrastructural deficiency, inadequate instructional materials, funding, supervision, monitoring and evaluation of TVET programs. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that the Federal, State government, tertiary institutions and NGOs should provide adequate funding, infrastructure and equipment, recruitment, training and retraining of TVET educators on emerging entrepreneurial skills and establish institution-based enterprises where students identify potential, develop entrepreneurial internship programme by matching students with successful entrepreneurs, make provision for a credit facility as take-off grant for TVET graduates at the end of the program to enhance self-reliance.

KEYWORDS: TVET, Graduates skills, Entrepreneurship programmes, Nigeria