Challenges Facing Technical and Vocational Education and Training Institutions in Producing Competent Graduates in Zimbabwe

The thrust of this study was to make an exploration of the challenges that Technical and Vocational Education andTraining Institutions face as they try to produce competent and qualified graduates in Zimbabwe under the reforms of competence based education and training and modularization. This study also examined the challenges which are being faced by TVET graduates in acquiring competencies for the occupations they are being trained for. The period of study was from January 2011 to April 2013. Questionnaires were administered to TVET trainees and trainers. The data obtained was entered into Portable IBM Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS) version 19.0 in descriptive statistics. The main challenges obtaining from the data collected showed that there was lack of training materials for the various workshops, obsolete training equipment, large classes, inadequate learning facilities, absence of industrial synergies, and poor exposure for the TVET trainees during On Job Training (OJT), weak performance of the economy, curricula and industrial expectation variances.