Impact of Employers Activities on Vocational and Technical Education Students’ Skill Acquisition during Industrial Work Experience Scheme in Ekiti State

Abstract

The study investigated the impact of industrial work experience scheme (siwes) on vocational and technical education undergraduates' skill acquisition. In order to elicit information required for this study, three research questions were raised and answered while a null hypothesis was formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. A 38 item structured questionnaire titled Impact of Students Industrial work experience Scheme (ISIWES) was developed for data collection. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The sample for the study was 102 respondents made up of 42 male and 60 female vocational and technical educational undergraduate students in two institutions running vocational education programs in Ekiti state. Face and content validity were carried out on the structured questionnaire by two experts in vocational and one test and measurement expert. The Cronba chalpha method was used to compute the reliability of the questionnaire to obtain efficient of 0.81. Mean and standard deviation were used to analyse the research question while Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) statistics was used to test the hypothesis. Based on the analysis data collected, it was observed that SIWES programme positively impact on both the professional and entrepreneurship skills development of students. Challenges faced by students during Industrial training (IT) programme were also highlighted. There was also no significant difference observed in the responses of respondents based on course of study as to the impact of SIWES programme on their skill acquisition and challenges facing IT students in work place, among other findings. Recommendations were there after made on ways to improve on SIWES programme in order to achieve its stated objectives.