Impact of Students’ Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) in Enhancing Entrepreneurship Skills of Business Education Students in Colleges of Education in Cross River State

This study examines the impact of SIWES in enhancing entrepreneurship skills of Business Education Students in Colleges of Education in Cross River State College Nigeria. It sorts specifically to establish the extent to which SIWES enhanced various entrepreneurship skills of Business Education Students in the research area and to spot the challenges hindering the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills thereon, through SIWES.  Various authors’ views on the topic of the study were explored to a large extent under dual parts literature review vis-à-vis theoretical and conceptual, covering the variables under consideration. The work adopted survey research design and Multi Stage Sampling Scheme was used in drawing a sample size of 200 students from the population of the study. The sample size was determine using the Taro Yamane formula at 0.05 error level of significance. A well-structured questionnaire based on Five points Likert scale with weights: Strongly Agreed (SA) =5, Agreed (A) =4, Undecided (UD) =3, Disagreed (D) =2 and Strongly Disagreed (SD) =1, was used for data collection. The data collected was analysed using simple percentages, bar graphs, and One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to test the three formulated hypotheses. The result showed that an average percentage of 66.18% respondents accepted that SIWES is highly instrumental in enhancing the entrepreneurship skills of Business Education students’ in the research area, whereas 33.82% were of contrary views. The result of the ANOVA showed that (F= 149.12, p < 0.05) and since p (0.000) is less than p(0.05), it is an indicator of significance. Implying that SIWES significantly enhanced entrepreneurship skills of Business Education students in Colleges of Education in Cross River State. Similar results were obtained for other hypotheses. It was recommended among others that Tertiary Education regulatory bodies such as National University Commission (NUC) and National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) should make SIWES a condition for granting accreditation to Business Education programme and to set up a school based enterprise classroom resources or academy that will help to host the career development of graduating students from Business Education programme.