Building Capacity for Secondary School Teachers: Understanding the Influence of Information and Communication Technology on Job Effectiveness in Bayelsa State, Nigeria

This study investigated the influence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on job effectiveness among public secondary school teachers in Bayelsa State, Nigeria, with a focus on capacity building. Adopting a survey research design and a simple random sampling method, data was collected from 203 teachers using a structured questionnaire and analyzed with descriptive statistics and the Chi-square test. Findings revealed that a significant majority of teachers (63%) rarely or never engage in capacity-building activities, and 34% have no exposure to professional development platforms. While platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram (29.1%) and Google Classroom (18.7%) see some usage, 19.7% of teachers do not utilize any ICT tools for professional growth. The study identified poor internet connectivity (32.5%), inadequate power supply (25.1%), and lack of access to digital devices (15.3%) as primary challenges. The hypothesis test indicated no statistically significant relationship between the level of ICT usage for capacity building and teachers' job effectiveness (χ2 = 3.22, df = 3, p > 0.05). This suggests that while ICT holds potential, its current impact on job effectiveness is not statistically significant due to prevailing infrastructural and capacity deficits. The study underscores the urgent need for comprehensive interventions that improve infrastructure, provide affordable access to digital tools, enhance teachers' digital skills, and strengthen institutional support systems to enable effective ICT-driven capacity building in public secondary schools.