Vol. 1 Issue 1 - 2024
Nigeria faces a persistent challenge of youth unemployment and underemployment, despite the proliferation of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions designed to equip students with job-ready skills that largely focus on developing technical competencies. There is growing evidence that many graduates still lack the employability attributes. However, the current TVET curricula in Nigeria appear inadequately structured to integrate these non-technical skills systematically.. There is a lack of cohesive policy frameworks, curricular content, teacher preparedness, and assessment strategies geared toward the development of soft skills. The study, therefore, investigated the implementation of Employability Skills into TVET programs as a means of fostering national sustainability and development. This study adopted a survey method and descriptive research design. The population of the students are TVET students and Lecturers and the stratified and purposive sampling method was employed to select 71 participants. A self-designed questionnaire consisting of 15 items was used to gather information from the respondents. The mean rating of 3.57 indicated a high level of implementation of soft skills into TVET curriculum and training. The mean rating of 3.50 indicated that employability skills influenced TVET graduates job readiness and productivity. This study also revealed the major challenges of integrating soft and employability skills into TVET curricula such as a lack of teaching aids, large classes, poor access to simulation labs, collaborative spaces, ICT tools for modern communication training, students undervaluing soft skills and the absence of an institutional strategy to improve soft skills outcomes. It can be concluded that the implementation of employability skills and soft skills into TVET Curricula and training might improve the sustainability and industrial development in Nigeria. It was recommended that employers can co-develop training activities that match workplace realities during the instructional process
Employability Skills, Curriculum, TVET, Job readiness
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