Social Innovation and Skill Acquisition among University Graduates in Nigeria

Abstract

Employers of labour and business organizations often complain that, graduates from Nigerian universities are ill-equipped and that there is a mismatch between the skills acquired by the graduates and employers' expectations. This mismatch could be due to lack of essential skills and competencies needed by the graduates to make them qualify and to compete with few existing jobs as well as contribute successfully to enterprise progress. However, social innovation has emerged as a potentially sustainable solution to economic, educational and societal challenges. Thus, this study focused on the effect of the social innovation dimension on skill acquisition among university graduates in Nigeria. A cross-sectional survey design was adopted for the study. From the study population of 36,494, five hundred and thirty-three copies of a validated questionnaire with Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient ranging from 0.750 to 0.937 were administered to 2019 Batch C Youth Corps Members deployed to six selected states which represented the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria. The data collected were analyzed using multiple linear regression. The results of the analyses revealed that social innovation dimensions had a positive and significant effect on skill acquisition among university graduates in Nigeria (Adj. R² = 0.254, F (4, 510) = 44.826, p < 0.05). The findings further showed that education innovation (β = 0.257, t = 4.2428, p = 0.001) and digital innovation (β = 0.264, t = 4.329, p = 0.001)  had a positive and significant effect on skill acquisition, entrepreneurship education had a positive but insignificant effect on skill acquisition (β = 0.056, t = 1.012, p = 0.312) and agricultural innovation had a negative and insignificant effect on skill acquisition among university graduates in Nigeria (β = -0.039, t = -0.880, p = 0.379). Hence, the study recommended that there should be curriculum reforms that will promote the use of social innovation for the development of essential skills to bridge the skill gap among Nigerian graduates.