Staff development policy and competencies of academic staff: A case study of College of Education and External Studies, Makerere University.

Abstract

The study investigates the relationship between both training and staff support on one hand, with competencies of academic staff in the College of Education and External Studies, Makerere University on the other hand. The co relational and cross sectional survey method was employed in collecting data from the sample of 43 who filled the self-administered questionnaires out of a population of 119 academic staff. Data analysis at univariate level was based on relative frequencies from frequency tables and descriptive statistics such as means and medians on age and other numerical variables. At bivariate level, all hypotheses were tested by correlating the respective numerical aggregate with one of the independent variable with an equally numerical index on the dependent variable using Pearson’s correlation method. At multivariate level, the dependent variable was regressed on the two independent variables at ago using the multiple linear regression to rank – order the independent variables in terms of influence on the dependent variable. On the other hand, qualitative data were presented by reading the verbatim answers in the interview guide and giving them side by side quantitative statistics. The results reveal a positive correlation between training and competencies of academic staff and a negative correlation between staff support and competencies of academic staff. The study concluded that training is necessary if competencies of academic staff in the College are to be raised while staff support did not seem to be necessary as far as competencies of academic staff were concerned. The study recommends that the college pursues more strategic in service training programmes and also consolidate the existing ones so as to train its academic staff so as to realize its objective of having competent staff to increase efficiency and effectiveness.