ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION: COUNSELLING IMPLICATIONS FOR INNOVATIONAL SKILLS AMONG FINAL YEAR NWAFOR ORIZU COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, NSUGBE STUDENTS

Entrepreneurship education was introduced into the Nigerian education system to help citizens acquire necessary work-related skills, technical know-how and competences. In particular, it was envisaged that this would help Nigerian youths, especially college and university graduates to have requisite knowledge of innovational skills thereby become self-reliance. This paper tries to examine the extent to which entrepreneurship education introduced in tertiary institutions particularly colleges of education has positively imparted in students, the counselling entrepreneurship skills needed to be innovative after graduation. The population used for the study was 52 (29 male and 23 female) final year students of department of Educational psychology/ Guidance and Counselling, Nwafor Orizu College of Education Nsugbe, Anambra State. The entire population was used as sample because of its manageable size. Therefore, there was no sampling. The instrument used for data collection was a structured questionnaire developed by the researchers with a reliability coefficient of 0.84 titled “Entrepreneurship Education for Innovational Skills” (EEIS). Data collected was analyzed using percentage; mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while t-test statistics was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 alpha levels. The findings of the study reveal that entrepreneurship education had imparted in students the needed innovational skills and enough experiences to be self-employed after graduation. However, lack of funding, poor implementation and societal low rating of entrepreneurship education, corruption, lack of political will, inconsistency in policy formulation were among the problems encountered in the course of Entrepreneurship Education