Appraisal of the relevance of polytechnic higher national diploma building technology curriculum for effective occupational skills acquisition in Nigeria

Polytechnics are established for the production of technical manpower in a variety of technical and professional disciplines to make a country self-sufficient through efficient man power planning, optimum utilization and management of resources. Building construction programme is a major supplier of labour to the sectors of the economy, prominently the construction industries. However, the Nigerian graduates of this programme have been criticized for not meeting the requirements of the construction industries regarding attainment of effective occupational competences. This study therefore, analyzed the content of Higher National Diploma Building Technology curriculum to discover if the cognitive, psychomotor, and affective competences captured in the curriculum were sufficient to support successful acquisition of occupational competencies. The researchers used content analysis to generate and analyze data from the said curriculum through descriptive statistics. The findings of the study revealed that the cognitive competencies dominate the entire curriculum with 88.87%, followed by psychomotor competencies with 9.68% and lastly affective competencies with 6.45%. We concluded that the curriculum is highly lopsided having acute shortage of psychomotor and affective competencies. The authors drew the conclusions based on the analysis of data generated from the curriculum, and therefore didn't extend to include the perceptions of experts in academia and industry on the sufficiency or otherwise of occupational competences portrayed by the curriculum. The findings provide curriculum developers with information regarding the adequacy and/or inadequacy of occupational competences as contained in the Building Technology curriculum. This is important in the event of curriculum renewal towards balanced curriculum that has appropriate representation of all the spheres of occupational competences. This study is the first to analyze the content of any curriculum at Higher National Diploma level in Nigerian polytechnic to identify the satisfactoriness of the occupational competences. Copyright © 2020 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License