Perception of Professional Secretaries on Relevance of Shorthand Skills on the Modern Office Operations in Public Universities in North-East, Nigeria

Abstract

The study assessed the Perception of Professional Secretaries on Relevance of Shorthand Skills on The Modern Office Operations in Public Universities in NorthEast , Nigeria. The study was guided by 6 objectives, 6 research questions and 6 hypotheses. Survey design was adopted for the study. The population for this study comprised of the entire 203 trained professional secretaries in public universities in NorthEast , Nigeria. The Total Population Sample (TPS) of 203 secretaries were used for the study. The instrument used for data collection was questionnaire adapted from Sarki (2015), Oguntimehin and Oludele (2017). The instrument was validated by experts and pilot tested and a reliability coefficient of 0.83 was obtained. The researcher assisted by 5 co-opted research assistants administered the questionnaire using on-the-spot technique. The data to be collected were analyzed using mean and grand mean to answer the research questions while Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at .05 confidence level of significance. The result revealed among others that Shorthand skill is not relevant on report writing minute-taking of secretaries in modern offices operation. It was concluded that the job opportunities and job performance of professional secretaries will depend on their knowledge, skills and competencies on the operation of the technology gadgets and facilities found in the modern offices. Based on this, it was recommended among others that Modern technology such as (computer, scanning machine, tape recorder, dictating machine) should be integrated into the curriculum of business education programme, this will enable preservice secretaries to acquire skills needed for office operation before graduation.