THE ROLE OF GUIDANCE AND COUNSELLING IN ENSURING EFFECTIVE ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION FOR THE ERADICATION OF GRADUATE UNEMPLOYMENT

The paper examines the role of guidance and counselling in ensuring effective entrepreneurship education which will help in the eradication of graduate unemployment. The inclusion of entrepreneurship education in the curriculum of tertiary institutions by the Federal Ministry of Education was intended to make graduates to be self-employed and job creators thereby reducing unemployment in Nigeria. Despite this introduction for all these years, unemployment seems to be on the increase. The value of entrepreneurship education does not seem to have sufficiently impacted on them Based on this, the question arises: why the entrepreneurship education given to our students is not yielding the required result which is job creation? This work is based on cognitive counselling theory. The data was collected through literature review and it was found out that there is a strong positive relationship between career counselling and entrepreneurial development skills which reduce unemployment. It was concluded that for graduate unemployment to be eradicated in Nigeria, the counsellors must ensure that effective entrepreneurship education is put in place. The paper finally recommends the introduction of a course on entrepreneurship education counselling which should precede the main general course on entrepreneurship education in all tertiary institutions in Nigeria.