<p>Despite decades of globalisation exposure, Nigeria’s industrial base has remained shallow and structurally fragile, raising fundamental questions about whether openness alone can drive manufacturing-led development or whether its productive potential depends critically on the quality of human capital available to harness it. This study investigates how human capital moderates the relationship between globalisation and industrialisation in Nigeria using annual data spanning 1981 to 2022, with industrialisation proxied by manufacturing value added, globalisation by the KOF globalisation index, and human capital by mean years of schooling. Employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach, with Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares and Wavelet Transform Coherence for robustness, the results confirm a stable long-run relationship among the variables. Individually, globalisation and human capital exert negative and significant long-run effects on industrialisation, reflecting deep structural weaknesses and skill mismatches within Nigeria’s productive economy. However, their interaction term is positive and significant, indicating that human capital meaningfully enhances the industrial gains from globalisation when appropriately aligned with productive capacity. Short-run effects are limited, though adjustment toward equilibrium occurs rapidly via a significant error correction mechanism, whilst labour force participation consistently emerges as the most reliable driver of industrialisation among the control variables. Policy recommendations focus on improving technical education and carefully sequencing trade policies to maximise industrial transformation.</p>