Stakeholders in the education sector have called for a holistic approach toward making graduates from tertiary institutions employable and capable of solving challenges in society.
They made the call in Ibadan on Thursday, at the stakeholders’ engagement on the Modelling Graduate Employability Project sponsored by TETFund.
In his keynote address, an Education Consultant, Dr Muyiwa Bamgbose, said there should be a paradigm shift for lecturers, students, government and the society.
According to him, there are beliefs that has been handed down through the ages that needs to change.
“After all the reviews, I see errors in what the students think; they think that once they get certificates that is the end of it.
”The lecturers feel that all they need to teach is content, that is knowledge of those things. I believe I have shown that they need to go beyond knowledge and understanding and get into applications, analysis, and evaluation.
“I hope that the lecturers agreed to own the problem. We shouldn’t blame anybody of course, there are people who will not do the right thing. It doesn’t stop us from countering them and doing what can make the difference,” Bamgbose said.
Prof. Folajogun Falaye, the Principal Investigator of the project and Lecturer, Institute of Education, University of Ibadan, said the main goal was to have workable contributions to unemployment in Nigeria.
According to him, this is because of Nigeria’s peculiarities and the intentions to make recommendations to higher institutions of education as to what content can be infused into what is being done currently.
She said findings had shown that the main problem of employment was skills mismatch and it had been the gap between what was taught and the demand of the labour market.
Also, Professor of Educational Management, Segun Adedeji, said the aim of the stakeholders’ engagement was to ensure there were information and input that could solve unemployment.
”It is expected to also deal with unemployment from the industries, lecturers and Human Resources professionals as well as the students before going to the field.
“We need stakeholders as there are different dimensions to employability,” he said.
Adedeji added that stakeholders should ensure that in going to the field, they should involve all their dimensions like looking at personal dimension, institutional dimension and policy dimension.
