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HOW DO YOU PROCEED IF YOU STILL NEED A DEGREE?

There may be reasons to think you still need a university Degree after a National Diploma from an Innovative Enterprise Institution.

Workplace promotion
To attain specialization at a Masters level
A need to widen your horizon

There may be more, but whatever the case, as it concerns the presently approved programs and achieving practical competency in them, university education in this country (as it is presently) would not offer you better quality.

Of course, if your NID is used to gain employment in a corporate organization, you would require higher qualification to rise in hierarchy. A way to go about it is to subscribe to an online degree program or an approved Open/Distant Learning program in a reputable university around here. You would need to put in a lot of efforts and sacrifice, but it’s worth it after all.

If your need is to attain specialization in your chosen field, how you go about it depends. There are professional certifiers who require you to study and pass certification examination. They exist in the field of ICT, Administration, and Management, where you could use your spare time daily or on weekends to study and go for exams which may be in stages. However, there are fields of specialization which require full time study, and you’ll need to count the cost before deciding if you could drop whatever NID is helping you earn and embark on that route.

Word for Policy Makers

The primary premise for establishing IEIs and VEIs is for trainees to be self-employed and employ others. However, entrepreneurs would certainly get to a point where they’d feel there are greater heights to attain in learning and development. This is where policy makers in the country must wake up now by making industries work. Before NID products start to think of university as the next level, there should be functioning large industries to train them for mass production, international service delivery, and mass exportation of products and services.

Domestic industrialization will birth a more vibrant entrepreneur-dependent economy. Otherwise, the incursion of imported goods and services would continue to frustrate entrepreneurs and restrictive policy on importation would only heighten inflation. If this laudable education policy would be sustainable, it must be backed-up by massive industrialization effort.

More industrial and professional establishments should be encouraged to participate in Technical Vocation Education and Training (TVET). The culture of hoarding knowledge and skill is anti-progressive. Industries can improve their capacity to annihilate the importation of finished goods if they participate in training manpower to enhance production and supply.

Government should not allow universities and polytechnics to hijack this program, we’ve seen all they had to offer. However, IEIs should be incentivized, so they’ll be committed to actualizing the big picture and seldom making it business as usual.