ASSESSMENT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS POSSESSED BY SMALL SCALE BUSINESS OPERATORS IN DELTA STATE
Abstract
This study assessed the opinions of small scale business operators in Delta state on the entrepreneurial skills they possessed. The problem of the study is that small scale businesses in Delta State are either not doing well or have failed. The design of the research is based on survey method and the area of study is Delta State. The population consists of all the 984 small scale business operators in Delta state who were registered by the Ministry of Commerce and Industries as at December 2010. A sample of 625 registered small scale business operators from the 25 LGAs in the state were used for the study. Four research questions guided the conduct of the study and four hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. The validity of the instrument was established by experts in business education while the cronbach alfa reliability method was used and a reliability coefficient of 0.94 was obtained. Data collected were analyzed using mean ratings, z-test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA). From the results of the analysis of the data, it was discovered that ethics and moral skills, self motivation skills, time management skills and inter personal relation skills were rated as high extent. Small scale business operators did not differ significantly in their mean ratings of the extent they possessed ethics and moral skills, self motivation skills, time management skills and interpersonal relation skills as a result of their sex, location and educational qualifications. However, they differed significantly in their mean rating of the extent they possessed interpersonal relation skills as a result of their years of operation. Based on the results, it was recommended that curriculum planners should incorporate the identified entrepreneurship skills in the curriculum of entrepreneurship programmes both at the secondary and tertiary levels of Business Education so that prospective entrepreneurs could effectively manage their enterprises. It was also recommended that irrespective of the course of study at any tertiary institution, entrepreneurship training should be integrated so that the level of business failure could be minimized. Furthermore, it was recommended that workshops and seminars should be organized for operators of small scale business owners by the agencies responsible for the development of small scale businesses at all levels of government to create in-depth knowledge and technical know-how on the identified entrepreneurship skills.