The National Directorate of Employment (NDE) would include the training of entrepreneurial skills in its School-to-Work scheme, its Acting Director-General, Kunle Obayan has disclosed.
The NDE chief who disclosed this in Abuja, explained that the scheme is not strictly designed for training of skills sets but also intended to equip the trainees to manage small scale businesses especially young people from the south eastern states who are business conscious.
He explained: “Certainly, we are also interested in ensuring that the students become better citizens in the future. That is why we will be teaching life lessons such as how to dress, whose company to keep, financial management and relations with neighbours and how to cope with life challenges. We will also develop a feedback mechanism that will tell us what they learnt during the training for planning purposes as well as evaluation of the impacts the training had on the participants.”
The NDE boss also explained that while the School-To-Work Scheme is not intended to replace the 6-3-3-4 system, it may end up filling the technical arm of learning the system intended by offering technical education to students at young age.
“We have seen that even at the JSS level, there are some students who drop off at that point. The question is: where did those drop go to and who they eventually become? The intention of the 6-3-3-4 is that some of these students who are unable to go further would pick up a skill. It is evident that not every student in the JSS will proceed to SSS while not everybody that is SSS will proceed to the university or tertiary level. That is normal in life. So, this kind of programme takes care of all those gaps,” he said.
Obayan also explained that the programme is capable of fulfilling parts of the objectives of Technical Colleges that have been on steady decline in the last few decades.
His words: “Nigeria is missing a lot from the absence of Technical Colleges because we now have a lot of technicians and artisans that are half-baked because they do not follow any kind of curriculum in their training. While I would not say that it is replacing technical education, is that we need a broader curriculum in order to say that we are bringing back that technical training. This is a quick win to engage youth when they are on holiday.”
He hinted that the Scheme would be expanded after the pilot scheme has been implemented for a few years, saying, “we need to see the demand, the direction of the demand and the scope of the demand in order to chart a course for the programme and we can even develop a certification for participants that can be sued in any part of the world.”
The NDE boss said the argument that the students may forget what they learned before the next holiday may not be true going by the Directorate experience saying most of them indeed begin to practice their skills even before they finish the training.
The NDE boss explained that in designing the programme, the NDE took the skillsets that would be of interest to the inhabitants of particular state.
He added: “We have about 25 skills that would be taught in this Scheme. We are not going to train students in all the 25 skillsets that we have chosen for the pilot programme. There will be only five that would be on offer in each of the state. We would take into consideration the kind of skills that is attractive to the youth of a specific area.”
Obayan highlighted that the NDE would be willing to collaborate with the Federal Ministry of Education to explore the possibility of engaging students in vocational training during the first and second term holiday period.
