BUSINESS EDUCATORS’ PERCEPTION OF THE CHALLENGES TO SUSTAINABLE OFFICE TECHNOLOGY SKILLS ACQUISITION IN TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS IN DELTA STATE

Abstract

The main purpose of the study was to determine business educators’ perception of the challenges to sustainable office technology skills acquisition in tertiary institutions in Delta State. One research question guided the study and two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The design of the study was descriptive survey research design. The area of the study was Delta State, Nigeria. The population comprised 116 business educators in Delta State. The entire population was studied without sampling due to the size. A researcher-developed questionnaire was used to collect data for the study. The reliability of the instrument was determined through a pilot test and data collected analyzed with Cronbach alpha reliability test. The reliability test yielded reliability co-efficient value of 0.82. Mean and standard deviation were used to analyze data related to the research questions and to check the closeness or otherwise of the respondents’ responses to the items, while Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and z-test were used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that business educators perceived poor funding, lack of students’ commitment to learning, inadequate information and communication technology tools in the business education laboratories and lack of collaboration between administrators of business education programme and employers of labour as some of the challenges to sustainable office technology skills acquisition in tertiary institutions in Delta State. It was also revealed that gender and years of experience of the business educators did not significantly affect their opinions on the challenges to sustainable office education skills. Based on these findings, it was recommended among others that government should ensure that modern office technology tools and facilities are readily made available for the teaching of business education students. It was also recommended that government should go into partnership with private organizations so as to provide on the job training programmes like work based learning that will expose office education students to modern office technology skills.