SKILLS NEEDED BY TECHNICAL COLLEGES PRINCIPALS FOR EFFECTIVE JOB PERFORMANCE IN DELTA STATE

ABSTRACT

The study assessed skills needed by technical college principals for effective job performance in Delta State. Seven research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Descriptive survey research design was used for this study. The population of the study consist of three hundred and eighty-six (386) teachers from the six government science and technical colleges in Delta State. Proportionate random sampling technique was used to select 154 teachers for the study. Questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. The instrument used was validated by three experts. Cronbach alpha statistics was used to the compute reliability of the instrument which yielded a correlation coefficient of 0.87. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation. The t-test was used to test the hypotheses. The study revealed that the skills needed by principals for effective job performance in Delta State included communication, conflict resolution, motivating, management, leadership, mentoring and networking skills. It also revealed that male and female teachers did not differ significantly on principals’ possession of skills influencing job performance, same goes for experienced and less experienced teachers hence the null hypotheses acceptance. From the results of the analysis, it was concluded that the skills highly needed by technical colleges’ principals for effective job performance in Delta State are communication, conflict resolution, motivating, management, leadership, mentoring and networking skills. Consequently, it was recommended that principals should assist teachers properly in terms of extracting schemes of work from the curriculum and in providing or improvising appropriate instructional materials for different topics as a way of mentoring and motivating them. Furthermore, principals should be trained and retrained on new approaches to school management through seminars, symposia and conferences so as to supervise an effective workforce in the school environment. Finally, recommendations were made for further studies such as determinants influencing the acquisition of requisite skills for school administration.