Manpower Development And Commercialisation in The Nigerian Telecommunications

ABSTRACT 

The research is about Manpower Development and Commercialisation of the Nigerian Telecommunications. The Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) is one of the fully commercialised public enterprises in Nigeria; a very big employer of labour, has been facing a lot of problems since it was established. Efforts to revitalise and restructure sound and efficient telecommunications services present some challenges to training and development unit of NITEL. The study intends to examine carefully whether N ITEL possesses qual ified or skilled human resources and whether the manpower development and industrial training in NITEL are enough for a commercialised telecommunications enterprise. Three hypotheses were developed and tested with the aid of the questionnaire: (i) Effective Manpower development and training leads to effective implementation of commercialisation policy. (ii) The existing manpower development and training policies and their implementation in NITEL are not adequate for giving required skills, knowledge and attitudes to employees of commercialised telecom. (iii) The prevailing situations in NITEL have not been conducive to optimum utilisation of skills and knowledge that employees have gained from training and development programmes. vi The theoretical framework used is the system approach. The approach views NITEL as an organised system with several subsystems, which include training and development unit. It is believed that whatever affects the training and development unit of NITEL affects the entire system. Thus, the approach, generally, attempts to analyse the influence of training on an administrative organisation and specifically seeks to evaluate the impact of training on commercialisation of NITEL. To test the othes� raised in this research, the researcher ....-- employed primary data. Simple random sampling technique was used for that purpose. The hypotheses testing were based on the analysis of the responses, using sjplnle per.£._en.ta,9_� Our analysis revealed that: (i) Training and development are effective tools to effective implementation of policy. (ii) There is no relationship between the existing manpower training and development policy and efficient performance. (iii) Ineffective manpower, ill-trained/developed staff and in addition to unconducive working conditions will have adverse effect on commercialisation of NITEL. The study made useful recommendations: which if duly considered would improve N ITEL's performance. It was concluded that N ITEL needs adequately trained, skilled, and q ual ified workers required to begin commercialisation of the enterprise.