Enhancing Students’ Entrepreneurial Skills through Counseling Services: Challenges and Prospects for Secondary School Counselors in Bamenda, Cameroon
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The purpose of this study was to examine the challenges of and prospects for Secondary School Counselors in Bamenda Municipality in their attempt to enhance students’ entrepreneurial skills through school counseling. The study was guided by two specific objectives focussing on the challenges encountered by counselors in the administration of their duties, and the way forward on improving counseling services for enhancement of students’ entrepreneurship skills. The research method was the qualitative method, and the research design was the exploratory design, where qualitative opinions gotten from 10 purposively sampled school counselors using an Educational Counseling and Entrepreneurship Interview Guide (ECEIG). Thematic analysis and descriptive narrations were used to analyze the opinions gotten and results summaries displayed on tables and followed descriptive narrations. From the findings, the school counselors identified some of their challenges to include; limited awareness of parents and students on the importance of counseling services, limited time for practical clinical counseling diagnoses and practices and as a result, more of theory than practice, lack of counseling laboratories, reluctance by professionals to visit schools to talk to children on entrepreneurship and students lack of interest in entrepreneurship related activities among other challenges. As the way forward, the counselors identified; the training of more school counselors in order to reduce the wide counselor-student ratio and bring it to standard, mandatory open days where students are exposed to different career, professional and entrepreneurial orientations and placements from counselors and professionals invited by school authorities to motivate the students, counselors also suggested that entrepreneurship be made a compulsory subject in secondary schools, and not only that, but students could pushed towards showing prove of the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills as a precondition for graduating from secondary schools in the country among others.
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