The effect of entrepreneurial education on entrepreneurial competencies: a study of students of the vavuniya campus

Abstract

The thriving chase of entrepreneurial education over the last decades has drawn a rising concentration in entrepreneurial education research, leading to the formation of an increasingly rich field of study. Entrepreneurial education has developed in prodigious treads and has spread broadly everywhere the world in recent decades. The evolving body of research studies has assessed and addressed the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education with intent to foster student’s advertence on self-employment as a career option and reinforcing entrepreneurial competencies and culture among university students through entrepreneurial education. Entrepreneurial competencies have considered as crucial element in business startups, development and success of the business performance. Since, it is the totality of knowledge, skills, and abilities essential to create, organize and to manage a business venture effectively. Therefore, it is important and urgent to develop entrepreneurial competencies among students in Universities that foster self-employment among the undergraduates. The main objective of this study is to identify the effect of entrepreneurial education to enhance the entrepreneurial competencies of the undergraduates of the Vavuniya Campus. For this purpose, four competencies were identified - Cognitive and non- cognitive competencies, Business and management competencies, Human relations competencies, Conceptual and relationship competencies - and analyzed. The four main competencies consist of six variables. The data were collected by issuing the questionnaire.100 undergraduates identified in Vavuniya Campus and data were collected from the fourth year and third year students of the Vavuniya Campus. Simple random sampling technique was used in this study. This study used Descriptive analysis, and Principal Components with Varimax Rotated Method of factor analysis for analyzing the Entrepreneurial competencies using the Statistical package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 20.0 version. The results indicated that the factors extracted from the analysis consist of 70.4% variance. Based on the factor score, the cognitive and non-cognitive competencies score value is 6.88, the second was the Business and Management competencies (5.34), the third was the human relations competencies(3.26) and the conceptual and relationship competencies was in the fourth rank (2.86). Based on the analysis the finding of the study indicated that the entrepreneurial education highly effects on cognitive and non-cognitive competencies than other competencies of the Vavuniya Campus Students.