Employability Skills of Business Education Graduates of Colleges of Education in North-West Nigeria

The research is financed by TETFund Research Project (Nigeria) Abstract The aim of the research is to find out the extent to which graduates of Business Education acquired employability skills on graduation from Colleges of Education in North-West Nigeria. The mandate of Business Education aims at skills acquisition to make graduates employable, self-employed, and self-reliant or employer of labour. One research question and one null hypothesis guided the study. The population for the study consisted of all business education lecturers in Colleges of Education, registered Small and Medium Scale Enterprises and Ministry of Commerce and Industries staff in North West Nigeria. The proportionate stratified and purposive sampling techniques were employed to selected sample size of 302 respondents, made up of 87 lecturers, 220 Directors/managers of SMSEs and staff of Ministry of Commerce and Industries in North West Nigeria. A structured questionnaire was used as instrument for data collection, which was face validated by experts. Cronbach Alpha Reliability Coefficient of 0.86 was obtained for the study. The instrument was administered on personal contact with the help research assistants. The data collected were analyzed using mean in answering the research question while t-test analysis was employed in testing the null hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. It was found that Business Education NCE graduates possess employability skills to a moderate extent from departments of business education, Colleges of Education North West Nigeria. Business educators in Colleges of Education North-West Nigeria should adopt teaching pedagogical to inculcate employability skills in NCE students. Keywords: Employability skills, Business Education, Graduates, Colleges of Education