Determinants of Students’ Entrepreneurial Career Intentions: The mediating role of Entrepreneurship Education
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Date
2020-06
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Publisher
A.A.U
Abstract
In difficult times when young educated workforce can’t get a job, it is becoming challenge for nations. It is rather harder for developing countries, like Ethiopia, where governments are not having enough resources to support the unemployed workforce. For decades unemployment rate has been mounting in Ethiopia and become very critical issue to the country and there is no sign of decrements anytime soon. Self-employment and genuine intervention from every stakeholder are referred as the best solution to tackle the problem. This research aims to study the impacts of personal traits, behavioural, and demographic characteristics with a mediating role of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intentions of university students of Ethiopia. This research will be a value addition in Ethiopia as well as sub-Saharan Africa scenario as it will provide knowledge base for entrepreneurship in the region and country. A quantitative, cross-sectional research design and simple random sampling was adopted.Data was collected from the sample of 263 university students. Descriptive statistics, correlation, regression analysis and hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze the data with the aid of SPSS version 25. In addition to that, Baron and Kenny (1986) four step regression method was used to compute mediation analysis. The results shows, entrepreneurship education has a strong mediating effect between the aforementioned constructs and entrepreneurial intentions among university students. The entrepreneurial intentions of students are influenced directly by the students’ entrepreneurship education, innovativeness, proactivness, and risk taking and indirectly by self-efficacy. It can be concluded that self-efficacy can contribute significantly to development of students’ entrepreneurial intention when mediated by entrepreneurship education. However demographical characteristics (Gender and Age), were insignificant with the intentions of students to become entrepreneur. The findings call for ministry of higher education and universities to emphasize more on entrepreneurship education in developing personal skills, attributes and behavioral aspects to realize the full potentials of students with regards to entrepreneurial intention. However, more in-depth studies need to be undertaken to fully understand determinants of entrepreneurial intention at a country and regional level.
Description
A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Programs of Addis Ababa
University in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree
of MSc in Management (Innovation Management &
Entrepreneurship)
Keywords
Entrepreneurship Education, Entrepreneurial Intentions, Traits, Demographics