Fourth Industrial Revolution and Business Education Programme in Nigeria: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is all about changing technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) that will have broad and deep impact on all aspects of life such as education, health and business. The purpose of this paper is to determine the challenges and opportunities of 4IR for humanity in general and Business Education Programme in Nigeria in particular based on a desktop study. The concept of Industry 4.0 and historical development of Industrial Revolutions (IRs), emerging challenges brought by the 4IR with its opportunities were briefly analyzed. The paper equally examined Business Education programme in Nigeria with myriads of problems undermining effective training of students to meet the challenges of global technological age. For Business Education Programme in Nigeria to meet the challenges posed by the 4IR, the paper recommends among others; the need for curriculum review to meet the 21 st Century skills need of the industry, adequate funding of the programme in the area of ICT adoption, training and retraining of business teacher educators, and collaboration between academia and the industrial sector.