Exploratory Factor Analysis of Managerial Entrepreneurial Competencies for Technical College Programs

Abstract

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) has many useful purposes in social sciences research. The most common EFA uses between researchers involves reducing reasonably enormous variables to manageable ones, developing and sanitizing a novel instrument’s scales and examining the relationships between variables to make a theory. The purpose of this study was to identify and analyzed a managerial entrepreneurial competency (MEC) for technical college programs in northwest geo-political zone of Nigeria. A quantitative research approach was used to develop insight from the experts’ perspectives via a survey questionnaire. The samples of the study involved 331experts including 249 teachers from nine technical colleges and 82 SMEs in the three states of the zone. Data collected were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 24, with a value of 0.864 as the Cronbach’s alpha. Moreover, the value for KMO measure of sampling adequacy equaled 0.830 and the value for Bartlett’s test was significant at 0.000 level. Consequently, out of the 15 elements run for the EFA, three elements were deleted because they did not meet the prerequisite of the factor analysis. The findings identified twelve important competencies needed for integration into technical college programs curricular. Therefore, the researchers recommended that the identified managerial entrepreneurial competencies are appropriate for integration into technical college programs curricular for sustainable entrepreneurship training of technical college student for self-employment.