SOURCE:

Faculty: Education
Department: Vocational Education

CONTRIBUTORS:

Goddymkpa C. Precious
Ezenwafor J. I.

ABSTRACT:

This study was necessitated by the need to enhance the performance of business education graduates in small scale business (SSB) operations in Akwa Ibom State. It assessed entrepreneurial skills required by business education graduates for small scale business operations in Akwa Ibom State. Five research questions guided the study and 10 null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. The population consisted of 505 registered business education graduates that operate SSB enterprise in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. No sample was taken as the number was deemed manageable by the researcher. A structured 55 – item validated questionnaire was used for data collection. The reliability of the instrument was obtained using Cronbach Alpha method and obtained 0.80, 0.97, 0.89, 0.66, and 0.95 for Parts B1 to B5 respectively with overall reliability value of 0.85. Data related to the research questions were analyzed using mean and standard deviation, while t-test statistic was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results revealed that the business education graduates who operate small scale businesses in Akwa Ibom State highly required information and communication technology skills, marketing skills and human resources management skills but moderately required business management and creativity skills. It was found that gender and location did not significantly influence the respondents’ mean ratings on their possession of the five entrepreneurial skills used in the study. The researcher concludes that in order to achieve business success in small scale business operations in Akwa Ibom State, the respondents need to upgrade their skills through conferences, seminars and workshops. It was recommended among others, that relevant supervisory and regulatory agencies should organize seminars on entrepreneurial skills required for effective running of SSB operations and ensure that all registered Business Education graduates attend the seminars. This will help to reduce the rate of business failures in Akwa Ibom State.