Influence of quality management systems on automotive engineering students’ perfomance in national examinations at public technical institutes in North Rift Kenya

Abstract

Quality management system is generally described as a collective, interlinked system of quality management practices that is associated with organizational performance. It is set of coordinated activities to direct an organization in order to continually improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its performance. Many technical institutions in Kenya have adopted Quality Management Systems as part of performance contracting requirement by government to enhance performance and improve service delivery. Implementing quality management systems in an organization is expensive and time consuming. Despite enormous resources spend and massive investment by government in technical institutes; their performance in national examinations remain poor. Therefore this study sought to investigate the influence of quality management systems on automotive engineering students‘ performance in public technical institutions in the North Rift Kenya. The study was guided by four objectives: To assess the extent customer focus influence examination performance; to investigate extent to which leadership influences performance in national examinations; to establish whether involvement of people (teamwork) influence examination performance and to assess the extent the principle of continuous improvement influence the performance of national examinations. The target population of the study was 633 members of staff from four Technical, Vocational and Education Training (TVET) institutions which are ISO 9001: 2008 Certified in North rift. This study used descriptive survey design. Krejcie and Morgan table was used to get sample size. Questionnaires were used to collect data from staff. The data collected was analyzed using Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) to generate descriptive statistics such as percentages. Inferential analysis was also generated by SPSS so as to measure the relationship between independent variables and the dependent variable.