HIGHER LEARNING INSTITUTION: ROLES IN GENERATING HIGHLY POTENTIAL TECHNOLOGY WORKERS FOR THE INDUSTRY

Abstract

The RMK 11 set out to catapult the nation into its high income nation vision of 2020. As set out in the plan, the national economy not only requires knowledge workers for the industry but also workforce who create employment. This strategy requires high level of innovation, thus potentially creative and innovative graduates. This paper is written with the objective of highlighting how a higher learning institution in this country could generate these workforce? The study set out with the investigation of what factors other than curriculum and pedagogy that would influence graduates creativity and innovative potential summarised as creative capacity [1]. Learning from studies and model put forward by Amabile et al [2], the study was made to focus on how a higher learning institution can emulate an industry behaviour. The hypothesis stands as how teaching staff perception on the institution innovation supporting climate influences student’s innovativeness and creativity, as how the industry workforce do? Two research questions were being addressed by the study. First is how much student's perception of the institution climate that supports innovation and creativity, is influenced by the teaching staff perception. The second question is how this perception does supports student’s potential creativity and innovativeness. To pursue this study, Amabile et al [2] ten dimensions model on measuring climate supporting innovation and creativity in an organisation is used. Surveys were conducted capturing 47 respondents (n=47) from the higher learning institution teaching faculty and 122 respondents (n=122) from the students of the same institution. To address the second question, the TTCT model [3] were used to help determine these students’ creativity potential. As a second assessment to enhance the validity of the findings, these students were also exposed to the Bandura [4] model of individual creative self-efficacy perception questionnaires. The data when analysed revealed two important phenomena. First, the standard deviation of the teaching faculty and the students follows a very close shaped perceived profile on climate supporting innovative, indicating strong influence from teaching faculty on the students’ perception. The second observation shows that the student’s creativity potential measured by their ideas in term of quantity and categories relates to fluency and flexibilities as advocated by Guilford [5], are higher for those students having higher perception scores in the organisation innovation support climate. The third observation, reinforced the second observation when the students’ creative self-efficacy perception correlate with their organisation climate perception scores. It can therefore be concluded that, ensuring higher level of perception on the higher learning institution innovation supportive climate among the teaching faculty can be one of the strategy to generate graduates with high creativity and innovation potential.