Nigeria’s struggles with maximizing her wealth of human and natural resources is well documented. However, while more pronounced obstacles such as corruption, inefficient leadership, civil wars, communal rifts, nepotism, tribalism, political violence, terrorism and bad financial policies have taken the credit; the decay of the educational sector and the subsequent mismatch between the educational outputs and the demands or reality of the Nigerian labour market has caused severe damage to the realization of the Nigerian dream. Generally, technical education and the training of the highly needed technicians suited to emerging jobs within Nigeria has encountered many challenges, and are further impeded by the adoption of archaic and conservative policies unattainable in today’s world; thereby resulting in issues like the disconnection of school curriculum from social needs, corruption in the educational development funds and a worrying indifference on teachers’ part. It is important to note that the Nigerian education policy stipulates technical education as a learning avenue devoted to the development of high-quality technical human resources, with its goal as building a talent pool for the advancement of the country’s economy by means of vocational education. However, these shortcomings due to the massive skill mismatches in the Nigerian labor market have led to a huge economic loophole in the nation’s economy. Particularly, this text believes that the root cause of this skill mismatch seemingly lies in the dearth and neglect of vocational education courses, and the continued lack of attention by the Nigerian government to this issue is undoubtedly one of the main causes of massive unemployment and poverty in Nigeria. These main causes plus the continued ridiculous amount of resources committed to reviving education in Nigeria makes it pertinent to study the end products of our educational institutions. Likewise, the important part of vocational education in Nigeria is missing from the national development strategy. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the problems, challenges and directions of the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) as an avenue of national development in Nigeria, with regards to its close relations to the Nigerian labor market, while proposing ways to improve TVET teaching according to the needs of the labor market.

vocational education and labor market, skill mismatch, skill mismatch measures