Author(s): Charles S Masoabi, Gregory Alexander
Entrepreneurship education is becoming a necessity globally, including South Africa. This phenomenon is booming as a response to improving economic distress, innovativeness, and youth unemployment. This paper explores the viability of including entrepreneurship education within engineering studies in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges in South Africa. Moreover, students need to exit the TVET colleges as institutions of higher learning with relevant entrepreneurial skills to improve employability and growth of the economy. Universally, TVET colleges envisage the graduates to acquire skills, values and knowledge that are labour market related in response to economic demands of the countries. It is general knowledge among TVET lecturers that high numbers of graduates are unemployed. Amid COVID-19 pandemic resulting in economic lockdown around the world may exacerbate the unemployment rate of engineering studies TVET graduates. This inquiry employed a qualitative approach, by reviewing existing literature on the current response of entrepreneurship education within TVET sector to the global economies. Furthermore, interviews with TVET Engineering lecturers to establish the current state the TVET sector in South Africa. Content analysis was employed on reviewed literature and themes that emerged from interviews. Results indicate that European and Asian countries highly promote entrepreneurship education in the TVET sector. In some African countries, entrepreneurship education is included even though it is basic in its composition. While in South Africa entrepreneurship education is not part of engineering studies course design. Inclusion of Entrepreneurship education is recommended to improve employability of engineering TVET graduates.