Be as it may, the present believe is that the university education should develop in the beneficiary a certain number of employability skills to a caliber that will ascertain the perpetuated ingenious productivity of the individual. These skills, according to Obayan (2002), include:
i. analytical power; this comprises an advanced capacity for logical reasoning, employing appropriate verbal, quantitative, graphic, documentary, audio-visual, sensory perceptions and a wide variety of tools.
ii. communication; this includes oral and written as well as (in other possible forms) using the appropriate language and non-verbal forms in specific situations to achieve specific objectives.
iii. problem-solving; this is the ability to task one’s analytical power to the maximum in developing possible solution paths to the problem in a variety of situations.
iv. team spirit; is the ability to contribute meaningfully to group activities in a wide variety of forms to relate with others to get out of one’s shell while remaining oneself.
v. creativity; refers to the ability to go beyond the well-trodden path in thinking as well as in action.
vi. life-long learning skills; which include perseverance, risk taking, a spirit of enquiry, reading as a habit, self-directed learning efforts, the activity to face challenges and so on (p. 4).
In today’s labour market, employers of labour append much significance to graduate employability which refers to work preparation, that is, ownership of the skills, knowledge, attitudes and commercial understanding that will empower incipient graduates to make productive commitments to organisational objectives soon after commencing work (Mason, 2001). The Federal Government of Nigeria, in conjunction with some agencies, at one time or another, have introduced some palliative measures to address the state of joblessness. The government organised different programmes such as National Directorate of Employment (NDE) that was launched in 1986 with the mandate of designing programmes that will promote attitudinal change, employment generation, poverty reduction and wealth creation. National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) was also launched in 2001 to address poverty and related issues.
Other programmes including You Win were launched in 2011 specifically to generate jobs by empowering and supporting yearning entrepreneurial youth in Nigeria to create and execute business ideas that would lead to job creation. The National University Commission (NUC) introduced Entrepreneurial Studies as a compulsory course called “Graduates Self-Employment†(GSE 301) into universities curriculum in 2004 to enable university graduates to become self-employed. Yet, there is still the high rate of unemployment, especially among the Nigerian university graduates. Despite the programmes, the Federal Government of Nigeria in 2008 still acknowledged that about 80 percent of Nigeria’s youth are unemployed and 10 percent underemployed (Daily Trust, 2008).
Oyesiku (2010) reported that available statistics show that the nation’s job creation capacity is growing at an annual rate of five percent and seven percent over the last seven years. In the interim, about 213 Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education in the country then produced over 300,000 graduates annually; a number that should usually meet the nation’s human capital resource assets, however employers willing to pay well to attract skilled workers are increasingly finding it difficult to fill the job vacancies. Federal Office of Statistic (2012) also reported that with the current unemployment rate at 23.9 percent and unemployed youth population put at 20.3 million, Nigeria produced about 4.5 million new entrants into the labour market every year.
The Nigeria’s vigorous economic performance over the last decade has not translated to jobs and real-life opportunities for its youth. Akanmu (2011) asserted that three out of ten graduates of tertiary institutions cannot find jobs, and being highly educated does not increase the chance of finding a jobs. Those who find jobs are not usually gainfully employed; some are forced to accept marginal jobs that do not use their qualifications in sales, agriculture and manual labour while employers are often probing for skills that transcend qualifications and experience. Apart from the sluggish growth rate of the Nigerian economy, it lacks the structural and transformational capacity that is sufficient to expand employment for the long bloated labour market. In other words, whatever growth that takes place in Nigeria is not labour intensive and as such cannot engender a commensurate proportion of jobs for the unemployed graduates.
Therefore, the Nigerian society today is facing challenges of getting the education that will deliver to the students the right set of skills and knowledge demanded by the labour market. The reality on the ground is that the university education should turn out students who are ready to fill available jobs in the marketplace. The National Universities Commission (2004) affirmed that massive unemployment of Nigerian university graduates in the country is traceable to the disequilibrium between labour market requirements and essential employable skills by the graduates. However, contention subsists regarding what exactly constitutes what employers are requiring from graduates in the labour market. It was against this background that the researcher is interested in investigating the relationship between labour market core skills requirements and university graduate soft skills competence in North-west, Nigeria.
