Relevance Of School Education To Employment: Expectations Of Employers In Harare

Abstract

The link between education and development has been fairly well established. Education has been accepted as an investment while the human resource has been accepted as a critical factor in any economic development initiative. What is problematic is achieving the type of education that is most relevant to a country's stage of economic development. In industrialising countries, the problem of educational relevance assumes an even greater enormity. There have been numerous attempts at solving the problem, the most universal of which has been the vocationalisation of education —an initiative whose basic premise is that there is a mismatch between what traditional school education develops in learners on one hand, and the needs of the world of work on the other. A lot of literature has been generated in the debate on the efficacy, or lack of it, of the vocationalisation initiative. It does, however, appear most of the literature does not emanate from industrialising countries, and where it does, it does not often reflect the researched views of what business and industry actually expect from the school nor does it indicate whether employers think that vocationalisation of education leads to a better fit between education and the world of work. This study was an attempt to fill this gap in the literature.