Impact of Entrepreneurship Education on the Career Aspirations of Nigerian Para-Professional Librarians-in-Training

One of the aftermaths of the on-going curriculum innovations in Nigeria’s Polytechnic sector is the introduction of entrepreneurship education in all programmes/disciplines. The need to ascertain the impact of these entrepreneurship courses on the career aspirations of para-professional Librarians-in-Training (LIT) provided the prompting for this paper.A customized research instrument titled “Questionnaire on Effect of Entrepreneurship Education on Career Aspirations of Would-be Library Para-professionals†was used to elicit information from respondents selected through availability sampling from final year National Diploma (ND) and Higher National Diploma (HND) students of Library and Information Science in selected Nigerian Polytechnic. From the findings, it was evident that majority of the graduating students, who were the respondents, perceive entrepreneurship education as useful (84.6%) and innovative (82.5%) notwithstanding that only a few of them (8.4%) saw the programme as being librarianship-specific. However, an overwhelming majority of the respondents agreed that these courses broadened their knowledge (50.5%) and widened their employment options (71.2%). It was therefore, not surprising that the result of this survey showed a paradigm shift in the career aspirations of LITs as many of the respondents preferred to be self-employed or work in the private sector instead of waiting for the scarce traditional/conventional library-based employment. Recommendations were made to remedy certain flaws observed in the design and implementation of entrepreneurship education as part of the Library and Information Science discipline.