Entrepreneurial Skill Needs of Secretarial Education Graduates of Colleges of Education for Self Sustainability in Enugu State, Nigeria ()
1. Introduction
The higher educational programmes in Nigeria had fallen short of expectations, and as a result, many of the graduates of these institutions lack basic skills required by the labour market. The short fall in required basic skills has also resulted in mass unemployment among the graduates. The pace in technological changes in the field of business and education has affected the labour market. The educational programmes at all levels should be made relevant to provide the graduates with the needed entrepreneurial skill needs that should give adequate attention to entrepreneurial development in the country.
To be able to teach entrepreneurship education, the teachers themselves, especially the secretarial education programme of colleges of education should be well equipped with entrepreneurial skills to enable them develop an entrepreneurial orientation necessary for employability.
The secretarial education is a course of study offered in colleges of education, that equips its graduates with practical, professional and entrepreneurial skills. Secretarial education is also an aspect of vocational business education programme that gives training and imparts necessary skills that will provide the recipients with the intellectual and professional background, adequate for their assignment and makes the recipients adaptable to changing situations in the economy. This is in line with the National Policy on Education [1] that one of the ob- jectives of vocational and technical education was to give training and impart the necessary skills leading to production of craftsmen, technicians and other skilled professionals, who will be enterprising and self-reliant. For this reason, secretarial education graduates need certain entrepreneurial skills to operate in the society.
A skill is any established habit of performing a task in a way that is acceptable by a worker in his specializa- tion. It is the ability to use one’s knowledge effectively and readily in performing an act or a habit of doing a particular task competently [2] . The concept of entrepreneurship has been defined by academics according to their orientation and understanding of the subject matter. Osborne [3] defined entrepreneurship as a process of creating new systems, processes, mobilizing men, materials, machines and financial resources in order to pro- duce new products or serve new materials. Jain [4] defined entrepreneurship as a behaviour, attitude and an ap- proach to the way people create new values in the market, technology consumption, habits and build sustainable institutions and organizations. The author opined that entrepreneurship involves creating new products, new markets, new businesses, new technology by developing resources and people in a unique way to develop a new organization. The person involved in these activities is an entrepreneur. Arogundade [5] defined an entrepreneur as a person who has developed an ongoing business activity where none existed before. UNESCO [6] defined an entrepreneur as someone who starts or operates a business venture and assumes the responsibility for it. In the same vein, Anyakoha [7] defined an entrepreneur as a person who chooses or assumes risks, identifies business opportunity, gathers resources, initiates actions and establishes an organization or enterprise to meet such market opportunities. Entrepreneurial skills are those activity skills that will enable an entrepreneur to manage his own enterprise. In the context of this study, the entrepreneurial skills are the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours that will enable an entrepreneur to identify business opportunities, stimulate creativity and transform ideas into prac- tical and economic activities for sustainable livelihood. These skills are needed to perform certain activities such as managerial, accounting, marketing, human relations, technical and information and communication technol- ogy skills to run an enterprise successfully. Hisrich in Etonyeaku [8] stated that managerial skills are needed for planning, decision making, human relationship, innovative changes, visionary leadership and ability to manage change.
Anyakoha [7] stated that accounting and financial skills are needed to be able to interpret financial statements, knowledge of costing and ability to understand gross and net profit of any business enterprise. The knowledge skill will enable the entrepreneur (graduate) to grasp the understanding of business management while the tech- nical skills will enable him to run the day-to-day activity of this enterprise. Therefore, for the secretarial educa- tion graduate to be able to achieve self employment status, requires entrepreneurial skills which will enable him to establish small scale business for self sustainability.
The purpose of this study was to determine the entrepreneurial skills needed by secretarial education gra- duates for self sustainability in Enugu State. Specifically, the study sought to:
· determine the managerial skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability;
· determine the technical skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability;
· determine the marketing skill needs required for self sustainability;
· determine the ICT skills required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability.
2. Research Questions
The following research questions were answered by the study.
1) What are the managerial skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability?
2) What are the technical skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability?
3) What are the marketing skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability?
4) What are the ICT skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability in Enugu State?
3. Hypotheses
The following null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance.
Ho1: There is no significant difference in the mean responses of lecturers and students on managerial skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability.
Ho2: There is no significant difference in the mean responses of lecturers and students on the technical skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability in Enugu State.
4. Methodology
A descriptive research design was adopted for this study. A descriptive survey design is concerned with speci- fying the properties of educational and other phenomena [9] . The design is appropriate for this study because it sought the representative views of the lecturers and students on the entrepreneurial skill needs required by se- cretarial education graduates for self sustainability.
The study was carried out in Enugu State. The state has three colleges of education offering secretarial educa- tion programme, namely Enugu State College of Education (Technical) College of Ecumenical Education, Enu- gu and Federal College of Education Eha Amafu. The choice of the state for this study was necessitated by the adequate number of NCE secretarial education lecturers and students who constituted the respondent for the study and also the growing number of unemployed NCE secretarial graduates who will benefit immensely from the finding of the study.
The population for the study was 238 respondents, made up of 54 business education lecturers and 184 second year students offering secretarial education programme for 2012/13 academic session in Enugu State. The choice of lecturers was because the lecturers were believed to be knowledgeable enough in this field while the students would make use of the skills for lifelong sustainability.
The questionnaire was the instrument used for eliciting responses from the respondents. The questionnaire was divided into four sections: A, B, C and D, which consisted of 40 generated items. Section A sought infor- mation on managerial skill needs required for self sustainability of secretarial education graduates. Section B was on technical skill needs, Section C on marketing skills while Section D delved on ICT skills for self sustai- nability. The instrument utilized a five points rating scale of very highly required (VHR) 5 points, highly re- quired (HR) 4 points, slightly required (SR) 3 points, fairly required (FR) 2 points and not required (NR) 1 point. The class boundary limit for interpreting the results was as follows: very highly required (4.5 - 5.00), highly re- quired (3.5 - 4.49), slightly required (2.5 - 3.49) fairly required (1.5 - 2.49) and not required (0.05 - 1.49). The instrument was face validated by three experts in entrepreneurial education, two from the Department of Voca- tional Teacher Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and one from Federal College of Education Eha Amufu, Enugu State. The comments and corrections were effected and used for the final development of the instrument. The internal consistency of the instrument was determined using test retest with the use of Cronbach Alpha me- thod, which yielded a coefficient of 0.84 showing that the instrument was reliable for the study.
All the 238 copies of the questionnaire were administered by the researchers with the help of three researcher assistants, who helped to collect on the spot the completed questionnaire to ensure a high percentage return rate of the questionnaire.
The data collected were collated and analysed using mean to answer the research questions while t-test was used test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. If the calculated t-value was greater than the table value for the given degree of freedom (df) the null hypothesis was regarded as significant otherwise not signifi- cant.
5. Results
The results are presented in tables in accordance with the research questions and hypotheses.
6. Research Question 1
What are the managerial skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability in Enugu State?
The data presented in Table 1 above showed that all the items listed above had their grand mean above 3.50. This signifies that all the items listed above were accepted by all the respondents. All the items had their calcu- lated t-value less than 1.96 at 0.05 level significance indicating that there is no significant difference in the mean ratings of the responses of the two groups on managerial skills required by secretarial education graduates for self-sustainability in Enugu State.
7. Research Question 2
What are the technical skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self-sustainability?
The data presented in Table 2 showed that item 10 had the highest grand mean of 4.54. This signifies that communicating ideas, thoughts, information dissemination etc is very highly required as a technical skill re- quired to sustain any business enterprise. Table 2 showed that the t-calculated value ranged from 0.44 to 1.37 at probability level of 0.05 (two tail test) and 236 degree of freedom which are lower than the table value of 1.96. This shows that there is no significant difference in the mean scores of the groups of respondents on the technical skills required for self-sustainability.
8. Research Question 3
What are the marketing skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self-sustainability?
The responses from the respondents in Table 3 revealed that all the items listed above had their grand mean above 3.50. This implies that the respondents in the two groups upheld that marketing skills as highly required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability in the society. The cluster grand mean of 4.00 (SD 0.79) showed that all the items fall within the response category of highly required on the marketing skills required for self sustainability of secretarial education graduates in the field of entrepreneurship.
9. Research Question 4
What are the ICT skill needs required by Secretarial Education Graduates for Self-Sustainability?
The data presented in Table 4 showed that eight out of the ten items listed above had their grand mean above 3.50 while items 6 and 8 had their grand mean below 3.50. The result further revealed that all the items fall within the response category of highly required and slightly required. Table 4 also showed that the standard deviation (SD) of the items ranged from 0.66 to 1.61, indicating that the respondents were not too far from one another in their responses on the ICT skills required by secretarial education graduates for self sustainability in Enugu State.
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Table 1. Mean scores on managerial skill needs required for self sustainability N = 238.
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Table 2. Mean scores on technical skill needs required for self-sustainability N = 238.
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Table 3. Mean responses on marketing skills needs required by secretarial education graduates for self-sustainability N = 238.
10. Discussion of the Findings
The findings revealed that forty (40) entrepreneurial skill needs items for self sustainability by secretarial educa- tion graduates were highly required for them to function effectively in the business enterprises in Enugu State. The result of this study agreed with the findings of Meredith, Nelson and Neck [10] and Uko [11] that entrepre- neurial skills are required to manipulate input resources effectively within a particular enterprise to achieve the production goal. This implies that skills possessed by an entrepreneur will enable him to undertake an enterprise. This is in conformity with Schumpeter in Etonyeaku [8] that entrepreneurial skills are potentials required by workers through training, which ensures proficiency and competency in the performance of occupational tasks for economic benefits.
The findings in Table 1 revealed that all the managerial skills are highly required to achieve a self-sustain- ability. Osborne [3] opined that managerial skills are the various steps needed by an entrepreneur to mobilize men, money, machine, material and financial resources in order to produce new products. The findings of the study were in line with the findings of Ezeh and Eze [12] that managerial skills include adopting basic steps in starting a business, delegate authority and monitor performance, determine risks and risk management, among others.
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Table 4. Mean responses of respondents on ICT skill needs required by secretarial education graduates for self-sustain- ability N = 238.
The result of the hypothesis tested showed that there was no significant difference in the mean rating of the res- ponses of the lecturers and students on managerial skills required for self sustainability by secretariat education graduates.
The findings of the study in Table 2 revealed that all the ten technical skills were highly required by secre- tarial education graduates for self sustainability. This is in line with Odu (2009) that technical skills are needed for successful enterprise because these skills are necessary for securing and holding employment in a recognized occupations. Also technical skills are required to enable the graduates to perform effectively in their enterprise. The result also support Whetten and Cameron [13] that technical skills are mainly on work settings because the major goal of any skill is to help prepare the worker to improve on his competency in managerial role. The result of the null hypothesis showed that there was no significant difference between the opinion of lecturers and stu- dents as regards the technical skills required for self sustainability.
Data presented in Table 3 revealed that marketing skills are highly required for any effective enterprise. The finding revealed that marketing skills are required to identify new trends in the environment, knowledge of sea- sonal fluctuations and segmenting marketing according to customers’ needs. This is in line with Kotler and Kel- ler [14] that marketing is meeting consumers’ needs profitably and satisfying them by communicating marketing ideas to the consumers. It was found that overall marketing skills were highly required for with Okafor, Okeme and Oketobo [15] that entrepreneurial skills are required by women retirees for marketing fruit juice as a sus- tainable business in all the 10 marketing skills identified were above the cut off mean, indicating the that all the rated skills were required by the graduates in marketing their products.
The findings on ICT skills in Table 4 revealed that the ten skills are required by secretarial education gra- duates to achieve success in business enterprise. These findings are corroborated by the findings in the work Ojukwu and Ojukwu [16] that ICT skills should include; word processing skills such as formatting editing key- boarding, ability to use scanning machines, to select reproduction activities. According to Osuala [17] business operators use word processing for memos, reports, correspondence, among others. ICT skills are necessary tools for business operators because many people who do not own personal computers, go to business centres to type their documents.
11. Conclusion
Based on the findings of this study, it could be concluded that entrepreneurial skills are required for effective business operation. Lack or absence of these skills affects graduates in embarking on any business venture. The entrepreneurial skills would enable the graduates to handle all types of documents for their customers and the- reby meet their customers’ satisfaction successfully. The skills could serve both as operational guidelines for those in the business as well as training package for new entrants. The study has provided information on entrepreneurship skills that are required for sustainable business operation. Therefore, the secretarial education gra- duates need to combine all the skills identified or listed therein for effective business management.
12. Recommendations
Based on the findings, the following recommendations were made:
1) Secretarial education graduates should endeavour to acquire themselves with all the relevant skills neces- sary for them to create, and maintain their customers’ needs;
2) The findings of this study should also be made available to skills acquisition centres as a training manual;
3) It is recommended that all those who are not ICT compliant should acquire the skills to be relevant in the society.