Agriculture Lecturers’ Perception of the Benefits of Professional Meetings in Nigeria

Abstract

The study assessed Agriculture lecturer’s perception of the benefits of professional meetings in Nigeria. The study was conducted in Southeast and southsouth geo political zone of Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique was used to select eighty agriculture lecturers for the study. Data were collected with the aid of structured questionnaire and analysed using frequency counts, percentages and mean. Of the eighty agriculture lecturers used for the study, 59% were male, 81% married and 55% had their doctorate degree. The mean age and working experience were 43yrs and 11yrs respectively. Majority (98.8%) had attended national professional meetings in the past five years while only 32.5% had attended international professional meetings in the past five years. Also, 77% attend at most two professional meetings in a year. Of the five professional meetings (conferences, workshop, trainings, symposiums and seminar) examined in this study, result show that agriculture lecturers attach so much value to conferences (M =3.78). It was also shown that agriculture lecturers strongly perceive the benefits of professional meetings to be: connects one to relevant networking team (M = 3.86), exposes one to new arrears in agriculture (M = 3.82) and gives one the opportunity to contribute his/her quota to knowledge. Based on the results of the study, it was recommended the need to support agriculture lecturer’s attendance to international conferences and other international professional meetings to enable them expand their networking and collaboration activities. This is by offering sponsorships and other incentives to lecturers whose papers are accepted for presentation in such meetings.

Key words: professional meetings, benefits.