Determining Indices of Vocational Aspiration Pattern of Students in Secondary Schools in Ekiti State

Abstract

The focus of the study was to identify the vocational aspiration of the students and also investigate the factors that make students to aspire to certain vocation at the expense of some others. A survey research design was adopted for the study, a total of300 secondary school students were randomly sampled and stratified along local government, gender and school location-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. The reliability and validity coefficient was 0.75 and 0.70 respectively. Four research questions and two research hypothesis tested at 0.05 level of significance, guided the study. Frequencies, percentage and mean were employed to answer the research questions. The t-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses. It was found that a high number of the subject (242) which represents 80.66% of the sample aspired to such vocation like Medicine, Imw, Accounting and Engineering. The dominant motivating factors were vocational benefits, parental influence, and peer group. Sex was not an influencing factor on the subjects' vocational aspiration. It was recommended among others that school administrator should organize workshop and seminar on a regular basis for parent and students on the benefit to be derived from all subjects, especially vocational education subjects experiencing low enrolment. Government should also improve the working conditions and increase salaries of other vocations in order to raise their status and encourage recruits.