article · Eureka Journal of Educational Research
Youth unemployment in Namibia affects 44.4 percent of young people aged 15 to 34, placing technical and vocational education and training at the centre of national employment strategies. An evaluation of feedback from twenty vocational training centre graduates reveals positive views on instructor competence, overall programme relevance, and practical hands-on instruction. However, only 35 percent of these graduates secured employment within their field of training. Respondents highlighted significant structural weaknesses, including outdated training facilities that lag behind modern industry standards, inadequate institutional support for securing internships, and a lack of business and entrepreneurship education. These outcomes suggest that improving graduate employability requires strengthening direct curriculum links with industry demands rather than focusing solely on classroom teaching quality.
Addressing youth unemployment requires vocational education systems to deliver skills that directly match workplace demands. Understanding graduate experiences exposes whether public training investments translate into actual jobs. Highlighting practical shortcomings such as outdated workshop facilities and missing entrepreneurial instruction provides educational planners with concrete focus areas to ensure technical training programmes improve labour market outcomes for young people.
The findings can inform vocational curriculum design, corporate apprenticeship schemes, and the modernisation of training facilities for educational authorities and industrial partners. However, the abstract describes survey research into graduate perceptions rather than a proprietary technology or product. It provides empirical guidance for policy makers and training providers seeking to align skills programmes with labour market demands.
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Namibia's Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector is central to national efforts to address youth unemployment, currently estimated at 44.4% among 15–34-year-olds, and to align skills development with the African Union's call for demand-driven training. Yet Namibian evidence on how TVET graduates themselves experience this alignment remains scarce. This study investigates how graduates of Namibian Vocational Training Centres (VTCs) perceive their programme's effectiveness—satisfaction, employability, and perceived skills gained—and how well its curriculum has kept pace with changing industry and technological demands. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design was used, with 20 graduates completing a single online survey combining closed- and open-ended items, analysed through descriptive statistics and thematic analysis and integrated via a joint-display approach. Graduates rated instructor knowledge and programme relevance favourably, and identified practical, hands-on lessons as the most valuable programme component. However, only 35% were employed in their trained field, and graduates independently identified the same gaps found in the regional literature: limited business and entrepreneurship content, weak internship support, and facilities that lag industry standards. These findings, though drawn from a small, non-probability sample, converge with wider SADC-region evidence and point to curriculum-industry linkage, not teaching quality alone, as the priority for strengthening TVET's contribution to graduate employability in Namibia.
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DOI: 10.56773/ejer.v5i1.110
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