Secretarial training and the needs of employers in the Nigerian labour market

Abstract

The secretarial training has gone beyond typewriting or computer appreciation/application that is offered in the formal schools to the use of sophisticated modern equipment to perform work and many others. The changing trend, in the labour market profile have increased the complexity of skills required by today's workforce and threatened the positions of graduate secretaries. It is against this backdrop that the paper examined Secretarial Training and the needs of employers in the Nigerian Labour Market'. The paper discusses the concept of the secretarial profession, concept of training, purpose of secretarial training, characteristics of secretarial training, The Nigerian Labour Market, the needs of the employer, challenges of secretarial training in the Nigerian Labour Market. It concludes that the curriculum should dwell more on preparing the secretarial graduates on present realities of life in the workforce. The paper recommends among others that there is need for institution – industry collaboration in the training of secretaries. This is in view of the fact that the training environment for secretarial training is a work environment itself or a replica of the work environment. This can be achieved through redirecting government policies towards removing obstacles such as the unwillingness of industrialist to cooperate with the SIWES programme in the training institutions.