Implementation of new varsity curriculum will boost graduates’ employability skills

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The Acting Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission, Chris Maiyaki, has revealed that the Commission is working assiduously with key stakeholders to change the narrative on the dissonance between skills and employment potentials of graduates from Nigerian universities.

He added that one of the primary objectives of the recently launched Core Curriculum Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) by the Commission, when implemented, would address the skill gaps and make Nigerian graduates employable and employers of labour.

According to him, the new CCMAS is premised on the understanding that the university system is the bedrock of the intellectual and socio-economic progress of any nation.

Maiyaki, who spoke on Monday in Abuja at the 2023 International Summer School and Conference of the African Centre for Career Enhancement and Skills Support (ACCESS), maintained that NUC is saddled with the responsibility of ensuring that universities are equipped with the necessary tools, facilities, and skills to nurture employable graduates.

Stakeholders at the event expressed worry about reports that about 40 percent of Nigeria’s youth population are unemployed, and this is the cause of numerous social vices such as kidnapping, drug trafficking, armed robbery, cultism, and terror threats, to mention a few

The acting NUC executive secretary, however, said the Commission has also made entrepreneurship study compulsory for students in all universities in Nigeria, in addition to curriculum re-engineering and collaboration with industry to enhance the employability of Nigerian graduates.

While speaking further at the conference, which has its theme, as ‘Cultivating New Frontiers in Employability Research for Skills and Career Enhancement, ‘Maiyaki 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 that must align with the realities of global best practices.

According to him, this offers every student the opportunity to constantly refine the skills needed to be employable to excel in an increasingly competitive world, adding that the Commission was also leveraging on entrepreneurship programmes to ensure graduates become successful job creators.

”Entrepreneurship has now become part of our educational experience. This is because, in the face of unrelenting unemployment and the disconnect between theoretical and practical knowledge, it behooves 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 are a lot of half-truths, sometimes non23truth, 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 worldwide while formulating implementation machinery with concrete implementable actions to drive graduates’ employability.

Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Education, Mr Andrew David Adejo, while declaring the conference open, 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 jobs because of the problem of employability.

He said that the missing link between academia and industries must be addressed so that graduates would possess skills that would make them employable.

He says, “We must continue to collaborate to strengthen educational institutions to solve the problems of youth unemployment.

”This is because there is a missing link between both the teacher and what the market needs, so issues of unemployment and unemployability of African graduates will always remain very important.

”It is therefore important on us as Africans to devise and implement strategies to train persons that are not only fit for the labour market but will also find job placement when they graduate,” he said.

Adejo commended NUC for constantly advancing graduate employability by introducing Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) in 17 academic disciplines in over 200 programmes.

Also speaking, one of the ACCESS project’s resource persons, Professor Utz Dornberger, from the University of Leipzig, Germany, harped on creating competencies from Nigerian and other African universities to promote employability.

The Economics and Management Science Professor said, ” We want to support employability of students, and you can always support employability of students when you create more structures, more resources and more competencies for the universities to promote employability, to support lecturers and obviously every Nigerian university to develop their competences to help the students to develop the necessary skills to get better integrated into the labour market….

” The key focus areas are on the university to develop more linkages and collaboration with the private sector. These universities must create more collaboration structures with entrepreneurship centres and career services.

”Universities should train more of their own lecturers and professors to develop new approaches for teaching their students.

”Classroom teaching is not any more up-to-date approach, but we need much more collaboration with industries to bring the practical task and problems to the classroom.

”So that students can work on real-life projects and try to develop solutions for the private sector and also the whole society and lecturers of such universities have to coach this type of project. “

On his part, the team lead of Nigeria on the ACCESS project, Professor Adebola B. Ekanola, expressed confidence that the conference would usher in the needed results in repositioning Nigerian graduates to have the necessary skills to compete effectively in the ever-competitive global job market.

ACCESS, established in 2020, is in partnership with seven counties to provide innovative ways to promote the employability of African graduates.

The countries are the Netherlands, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Tunisia, and Germany.

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