Determinants of Students’ Entrepreneurial Career Intentions: A Study on Jimma University Business and Technology Field Students

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to investigate the determinate on students’ entrepreneurial career intention in Jimma University business and technology field students. Explanatory and descriptive research design was adopted with quantitative approach to examine the relationship among the study variables. Primary data source was used to answer the research questions. It was collected through standard and adopted questionnaires. Stratified random sampling technique was applied to collect information from the sample respondents. 324 closed ended questionnaire distributed and 295 (91%) were collected. The data was analyzed by using SPSS (Version-23). Descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were used for data analysis. In descriptive by using frequencies, percentages, mean scores, Standard Deviations and in inferential statistics, Pearson’s correlation and regression analysis were used to assess both relationships and effects between the determinate factors and entrepreneurial intention. The findings showed that correlation between entrepreneurial intention and dimension of risk taking, self-efficacy, access of finance and entrepreneurship education was strong and also innovativeness and family background was moderate relation on students’ entrepreneurial intention. In addition based on the regression analysis 55.7% of the entrepreneurial intention can be explained by predicators (independent variables) jointly. Thus, it has been concluded that internal factors (innovativeness, risk taking and self-efficacy) and external factor (access of finance, family background, and entrepreneurship education) has positive significant effect on entrepreneurial intention in Jimma University business and technology students. Finally the researcher recommended to coming researchers conduct research on the unexplained entrepreneurial intention dimensions (variables) under this study in wide scope and different methodology