Abstract:

The study explores the views of engineering and health sciences students at a leading African university on how strategies aimed at ensuring their employability and entrepreneurship on graduation can be improved. In light of high unemployment rates among university graduates and the youth generally in the country hosting the study and in other African countries, the findings contribute to evidence-based perspectives around this grand challenge. A mixed methods approach is used to gather data and to analyse it. The students paint a picture of a situation that needs urgent intervention going forward in order to drastically improve the strategic approaches to making students more employable and/or entrepreneurially agile. The skills that the students identified as critical to them largely mirror what engineering and health science students in other developing countries have suggested. This therefore suggests an emerging global view on the issue and strengthens the confidence in the utility of the findings to inform the design of a robust employability-entrepreneurship framework. The framework can further feed into and be informed by the business sustainability strategies of employing organisations.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: African Studies

Keywords: Entrepreneurial process & other spatial/temporal issues on African entrepreneurship. ,Policy & practice issues on African development and SMEs.

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Dr. Godfrey Mayende