Assessing Impact of Academic Departments’ Capacity on Student Employability Skills’ Development in Ghanaian Public Universities

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the employability skills development efforts of some five academic departments in two higher education institutions in Ghana and recommend ways to aid their creation of employable graduates. This pilot study adopted the cross-sectional design, using a personally constructed questionnaire titled ‘Capacity for Employability Skills Development Survey (CESDS)’. Two groups of respondents were involved in the study – level 300 students and their instructors. The academic departments sampled for the study were the Department of Business& Social Science Education, Department for Vocational and Technical Education and Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management, all at the University of Cape Coast. The other two were the Department of Tourism and Department of Secretarial and Management Studies at the Cape Coast Technical University. Findings of the study indicated that the academic departments moderately used majority of their resource capacities to equip their students with employable skills, with the exception of few cases where the students had low training in some of the employable skills. A major recommendation made was that the departments should put in place innovative measures to improve upon their deployment of all their resource capacities to enable them produce employable graduates.