Abstract:

Education is considered as a society’s machinery to equip its citizens with capacity (cognitive, affective and psychomotor) for useful living and to play patriotic and supportive role in national development. The assumed expectation of education stakeholders like parents, students, employers of labor and the general public is that the curricular activities of tertiary institutions should promote graduates’ self-efficacy and equip them with employability skills. However this expectation has been disappointingly very low. This is mirrored from the uncountable evidences which abound in literature. The poor quality of graduates produced by some tertiary institutions has contributed to the rise in the number of unemployed persons in the Nigerian Society. The cause of this negative outcome has been blamed on some factors; personal and societal factors, including the theoretical based curricular offerings by some tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Intervention by Government on this problem of lack of employability skills has been through many reform programmes. Industrial training program being one of such reforms was a strategy to help bridge the widening gap between academic knowledge and practice. This program in the tertiary institution takes the form of “Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme” (SIWES) which purpose is to equip students with employability and job skills. This paper therefore examines the content of this SIWES program with the view to identify gaps in implementation among others. This researcher advocates the optimization of ‘SIWES’ as a panacea for promoting self-efficacy and employability skills of final year students of tertiary institution in Nigeria. Recommendations were made for counselling implications for management of tertiary institutions.

Keywords:

Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme, Self-efficacy, Employability Skills, Tertiary Institution.