Entrepreneurship Competencies and Creation of Employment Opportunities by Business Education Graduate Students in Rivers State University

The goal of this study is to find out the extent to which entrepreneurial competences can influence the creation of employment opportunities by Business Education graduate students in Rivers State University. Two objectives and two research questions were raised to guide the study while two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The researcher adopted the correlational survey research design for the study. The population of the study comprised the entire 90 Business Education graduate students in Rivers State University. No sampling was carried out for the study because of the manageable size of the population. Data for the study were gathered through the use of self-designed questionnaires. The questionnaire were validated by three experts. Two in Business Education and one in Measurement and Evaluation all from the Faculty of Education in Rivers State University. The reliability of the instrument was established using Pearson Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) and the computation yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.81 and 0.89. The collected data was used for analysis using Pearson Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) to answer the research questions while z-ratio transformation associated with the correlation coefficients for each research questions was used to test the corresponding hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that innovative-thinking, pro-activeness, strategic-thinking and moderate risk-taking rates to the creation of employment opportunities by Business Education graduate students in Rivers State University to a high extent. It was recommended among others that there should be a more practical approach to the teaching of entrepreneurial competences such as innovative-thinking in schools to enable the students develop a critical thinking mindset after graduation from school.