IMPARTING ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET INTO FUTURE ENGINEERS THROUGH AN INTEGRATED ENTREPRENEURIAL ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

Youth unemployment has been a global phenomenon that has attracted diverse solutions from variousfields of endeavour. One of the solutions is the introduction of entrepreneurship education to thecurriculum of tertiary institutions, whose graduates are the bulk of job seekers. Entrepreneurshipeducation was introduced into Nigeria tertiary education in 2007 with the hope that undergraduateswill imbibe the spirit of entrepreneurship and prefer to be job creators rather than job seekers becausethe Government alone cannot provide jobs for the teeming annual turn out of youth that join thelabour market looking for non-existing jobs. Since the introduction of entrepreneurship education adecade ago, the situation has not improved as expected. Even the engineering graduates that aresupposed to create jobs by the virtue of their technical and innovative knowledge with ampleopportunities of technology-driven markets still dominate the labour market looking for jobs.Researchers have shown that the introduction of entrepreneurship education into tertiary institutionshave only exposed students to theoretical elements of the skills but failed to create a mindset neededto motivate the students to be self-employed. With this background, a system is required that willintegrate entrepreneurship skills into the core courses in engineering to enhance its importance and, aswell, instil entrepreneurial mind-set into the students and encourage them to translate engineeringknowledge to market value and thereby create jobs for themselves and others. This study therebydeveloped a learning model curriculum using one of the foundation courses in engineering as a casestudy to achieve these objectives. Further studies, however, will consider other foundation andspecialised courses to widen the scope of the study. Evaluation of the curriculum will be conductedusing pre/post implementation questionnaires to know the efficacy of the curriculum