A SURVEY OF GRADUATES EMPLOYABILITY IN GEOGRAPHICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN ZARIA AND ITS ENVIRONS, KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA.

OBEKA, S.S.

The aim of this study is to determine geography students’ interest by gender toward the profession and actual employment opportunities in the labour market. The instrument is a 5-point likert scale questionnaire used to collect data from the respondents. The reliability coefficient of the instrument was found to be r=0.83. The questionnaire was administered to three hundred and ten (310) students drawn from five (5) schools randomly selected from thirty (30) senior secondary schools in Zaria in Sabon –Gari Local Government Area of Kaduna State, Nigeria. The sample was selected using stratified random sampling technique, while simple random sampling was adopted for the administration of questionnaire. The nominal scale was converted to ordinal scale for ease of data analysis with a range of 53-124 scores and a class interval of 10. Starting from 53, a mean of 153.3 and a standard deviation of ±25.5 were used to determine positive, negative and neutral interest. Two research questions and two (2) hypotheses guided the conduct of this study. From the results obtained, mean scores, standard deviation and two way analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistics was used to test the stated hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results obtained showed that F – test calculated values was less than the F – critical values, hence, the result showed no significant differences between students interest toward graduate employability and actual employment in the labour market. The findings showed that no matter the awareness, gender disparity and interest toward graduate employability, employment scenario in Nigeria remains the same with several jobless geographers. It is therefore recommended that Government Ministries, Parastatals, agencies, professional bodies and stakeholders should engage in aggressive public awareness conferences, seminars and workshops toward improvement in employment opportunities of geography graduates.

Key words: Graduate employability, Geographical education, Environmental education, Zaria.