By Chukwuemeka, Vianney Chinweuche
The study was carried out to identify technical work skills required by College of Education (Technical) graduates for self employment in plastic production industries in Rivers State while six research questions were posed and answered by the study, six null hypotheses were formulated and tested at p≤0.05 level of significance. The study adopted descriptive survey research design and was carried out in Rivers State, Nigeria. The population for the study consists 104 respondents which include twenty eight (28) lecturers in Technical Education and seventy six (76) technicians in the five plastic industries in Rivers State. Due to manageable size of the population, the entire 104 lecturers and technicians were involved. Therefore, there was no sampling for the study. The instrument used for data collection is 157-item structured questionnaire titled “Required Plastic Work-skill Questionnaire RPWSQ”. The instrument was subjected to face-validation by three experts. The validates’ suggestions and inputs were taken into consideration in developing the final draft of the questionnaire that was used for data collection. To test for internal consistency of the instrument, Cronbach alpha reliability technique was employed, to obtain reliability coefficient of 0.84 for compounding plastic material, 0.81 for moulding plastic, 0.76 for reinforcing plastic, 0.83 for joining plastic, 0.69 for machining plastic products and 0.75 decorating plastic products. The overall reliability coefficient of 0.79 was obtained for the entire instrument. The data for the study were collected by the researcher with the help of four research assistants. Out of the 104 copies of the questionnaire administered, 101 copies were duly completed and retrieved representing 97% return rate. The data collected were analyzed using mean to answer the research questions and t-test for testing the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Based on the data collected and analysed, the study identified 52 technical work-skill items very highly required and 105 technical work-skill items highly required by college of education graduates in plastic production for self employment in plastic industry in Rivers State. On the hypotheses tested, the study found that there was no significant difference in the mean ratings of the responses of lecturers and plastic technicians on the technical work-skills required by technical education graduates for self employment in plastic industry in Rivers State. Based on the findings of the study, the study among others recommended that all the identified technical work-skills be used for improving the existing curriculum of technical programmes of Colleges of Education and Universities with technical education programme in the country, and that all the identified technical work-skills in plastic production be integrated into the programmes of skill acquisition centres in the state to take care of skill needs of the vulnerable youths and other groups with desire for salable skills for work in the area.