Relationship Between Entrepreneurial Traits and Business Start-Up Intent Among Polytechnics’ Students in Nigerian (A Case Study of North-Eastern Nigeria)

Abstract

Worldwide entrepreneurship indicators indicated that there is a desire to introduce entrepreneurship
education in polytechnics will assist in mitigating skills gap among polytechnics students. It is against
the background that this study was designed to examine how skills creativity, and innovation that will
contribute to effective business start-up intention of polytechnics graduates to embrace entrepreneurship
and become self-employed to reduce the rate of white-collar job seeking. Qualitative research approach
was employed where 363 graduates were selected form the sample size. Hypotheses were developed to
guide the conduct of this study. Well-designed structured questionnaire was employed to collect
primary data from the sample respondents. Tables and simple percentage and multiple regression were
employed to test the developed hypothesis. Similarly, relative predictive power of independent
variables against the dependent variables were equally test with the aid of multiple regression. The
result shows that skills, creativity and innovation have a significant positive effect on business start-up
intentions among undergraduate students of selected polytechnics in North-Eastern Nigeria. Therefore,
this study recommends that more resources channel to polytechnics to help undergraduates to have
more practical skills on entrepreneurship this will assist the students to involved in entrepreneurial
activities and embrace small business tart-up.