Attitudes towards skills training and occupational aspirartions of participants in schools for continuing education
Date
2012-11-21
Authors
Luchembe, Musonda
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Abstract
This study investigated attitudes towards skills training and occupational aspirations of participants in schools for Continuing Education in 1991. Six Schools for Continuing Education were randomly selected for investigation; 3 from rural and 3 from urban areas. The primary data collecting instrument was a structured questionnaire. Part of the data that was collected was nominal while the other was collected on a rating scale.
After the coding of the responses had been done, the Chi-square was employed to test the significance of the data obtained for three hypotheses while the other three used percentages. The Chi-square was used to test the following three major propositions: (1) that there is no relationship between the participants' level of education and their attitudes towards skills training; (2) that there is no relationship between the participants' home socio-economic status and their attitudes towards skills training; (3) that there is no relationship between the participants' environmental location of training school and their attitudes towards skills training. The remaining three propositions were analysed using percentages and were as follows: (1) that there is no relationship between participants' level of education and their occupational aspirations; (2) that there is no relationship between the participants' socio-economic status and their occupational aspirations; (3) that there is no relationship between the participants' environmental location of training school and their occupational aspirations. Findings of the study revealed that except for level of education, socio-economic status and environmental location of training school did not have a significant relationship with participants' attitudes towards skills training. Results also indicated that neither socio-economic status nor environmental location of training school had any significant relationship with participants' occupational aspirations. Other findings were that in spite of obvious constraints such as lack of capital, the majority of the participants would prefer to be self-employed. Self employment was more preferred because there were more opportunities to make more money and that there was more 'independence' as they would not have anyone to supervise them. Furthermore, the study revealed that the majority of the participants had a favourable or positive attitude towards skills training. The study revealed that the majority of participants would like to work in urban areas mainly because of the availability of marketing opportunities, better jobs and raw materials. It also revealed that the overall majority of participants in skills training programmes come from what may be termed a 'middle class' background, in terms of parental occupation.
Since a large number of participants has a positive attitude toward skills training and interested in taking up self employment, the conclusion reached was that skills training, whose objective is to train people for self employment, to some extent, is achieving its objective. For this reason, the existing training facilities should be expanded, initial capital and incentives to work in rural areas provided, in order to reduce the rural-urban drift.
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Keywords
Occupational Training - Zambia , Man Power Training - Zambia