Abstract
The need for business education graduates and students (would-be-graduates) to integrate properly into the world of work, in the contemporary business world to avert unemployment necessitated the study. The study adopted a survey research design. All the business education graduates who were entrepreneurs in the Plateau State constituted the population. Purposive sampling was used to select entrepreneurs (business education graduates) who were 240 managers of their businesses and had existed for five years and above. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire that had been modified from earlier studies and had a reliability coefficient of 0.76. Arithmetic mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, and the t-test was used to test the null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The results showed that business education graduates needed to possess the following competencies for effective entrepreneurial development: strategic competency, conceptual competency, opportunity competency, opportunity, learning competency, and personal competency. The results also showed that there were no gender-related differences in the respondents' mean ratings of the strategic, conceptual, opportunity, learning, and personal entrepreneurial competencies needed for entrepreneurial development. It was concluded that business education graduates and students make an effort to imbibe and utilise the recognised entrepreneurial competencies for their own personal growth in order to avoid unemployment
Keywords: Business education, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurial competencies, Entrepreneurial development, Graduates
Publication Date: 2023-12-09