By Maryam Abeeb
The National Universities Commission (NUC) has expressed its readiness to boost programmes aimed at improving employability skills of Nigerian universities’ graduates.
Acting Executive Secretary of NUC, Dr Chris Maiyaki, stated this in Abuja at the 2023 International Summer School and Conference of the African Centre for Career Enhancement and Skills Support (ACCESS).
Maiyaki said the Commission was saddled with the responsibility to ensure that universities were equipped with the necessary tools, facilities, and skills to nurture employable graduates.
Speaking further at the conference which has its theme, as ‘Cultivating New Frontiers in Employability Research for Skills and Career Enhancement ‘, the acting NUC boss said graduates must be fully equipped to face the challenges of a dynamic and interconnected world, constantly advancing in technology.
He said the improvement and update of educational programmes constituted a continuum which must align with the realities of global best practices.
According to him, this offers every student the opportunity for constant refinement of the skills needed to be employable in order to excel in an increasingly, competitive world, adding that the Commission was also leveraging on entrepreneurship programmes to ensure graduates become successful jobs creators.
”Entrepreneurship has now become part of our educational experience. This is because in the face of unrelenting unemployment and disconnect between theoretical and practical knowledge, it behoves on NUC to, in a multi-stakeholders platform begin to convene meetings of this nature to highlight the issues surrounding employability.
”We went into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), wherein we hope to get the buying of captains of industry, employers of labour and stakeholders to build consensus around the issues.
”And for this particular event, we are looking at employability research issues because there is a lot of half truth, sometimes non truth that are planted.
”We hope that international platforms of this nature with all the experts and academics will deepen knowledge surrounding the issues of employability so that we are well informed,” he said.
Maiyaki also pledged that the conference would harness some of the topical issues, best practices and emerging trends around the world, while formulating an implementation machineries with concrete implementable actions to drive graduates employeability.
Declaring the conference open, Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, David Adejo, called on tertiary institutions as well as captains of industry to devise a means and strategy to train Nigerian graduates that would be fit for the labour market.
Adejo noted that with the increasing number of tertiary institutions, especially universities, graduates coming out from these institutions cannot find job because of the problem of employeability.
