Business Education Competencies and Enterprise Effectiveness

Background of the Study

The concept of entrepreneurship has been described by many authors. It has equally been viewed from the roles they played in our economic, political, or social lives. Osuala (2015) asserted that the process of bringing together creative or innovative ideas and combining them with management and organizational skills in order to combine people, money and resources to meet an identified need and thereby create wealth essentially describes entrepreneurship. The introduction of entrepreneurial development in tertiary institutions will no doubt inject a new spirit in the mindset of the beneficiaries of the entrepreneurial study (Oduma, 2016). This will no doubt help to make the students to become self-reliant or self employed on graduation. Business education in its foundation level has entrepreneurship component. Thus, it is often perceived as education “for and about” business or training in business skills, attitudes and competencies (Okoro, 2007).

Business education enhances competency in areas such as Accounting, Management, Secretarial Studies, Offices Practice, Information and Communication Technology and Management. All these enable the recipient to seek career in business. Nwosu (2017) buttressed the view that business education is the aspect of education that equips individuals with accounting knowledge, secretarial skill and broaden their ideas towards how their chosen career works. The level of poverty and unemployment with their attendant social ills in the country seems to continue to increase at alarming rate despite the introduction of entrepreneurship in Nigerian higher institutions. Osuala (2015) and Anaele (2008) noted that business failure is rampant in the society. The underlying reason according to them is that small scale business is high-risk and full of uncertainties. An entrepreneur thinking of starting a business needs a broad array of entrepreneurial competencies which includes management and marketing competencies as the critical skills of entrepreneurial development to succeed in a competitive market.

Olaleye (2005) observed that students of Business Education need to acquire the management competencies for success in entrepreneurship development. He stressed further that business owners need management competencies for planning, organizing, supervising, directing, controlling and coordinating the business enterprise. These are in line with Ile (2011) who noted that business owners need these competencies in order to be successful in business. He opined that these competencies help to check and monitor performance against set goals and plan while harmonizing individuals and group efforts to achieve business goals. Akpan (2016) identified marketing competencies as the requisite for entrepreneurship development to include ability to capture and retain the attention of customers: ability to promote and sell the organization’s product; ability to analyze demand and supply situations, ability to acquire effective sales habit, ability to be self-reliant, ability to acquire good sales techniques, ability to carry out effective marketing and information research, and ability to be polite and cheerful.

According to Kazilan, Hamzah and Bakar (2014), business education competencies refer to a group of important skills instilled in each individual to become a productive member of the workforce. According to Imeokparia and Ediagbonya (2012), business education competency refers to a person’s capability for gaining and maintaining employment. Employability skills or entrepreneurial skills are the skills needed by an individual to function effectively in the world or work either as an employee or employer of labour. Specifically, business education competencies are very important for success in self-employment. Presently, skills possessed by entrepreneurs seem to be different from what they need to function effectively in employment. This is why the Secretary Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (2011), developed ways of assisting educational institutions and schools to produce younger generations who will be willing to work and outlined both fundamental skills and workplace competencies to include basic thinking, personal qualities, resources, interpersonal information, and business technology skills.

For a business establishment to succeed, it needs to be managed using the requisite competency skills, if not, running that business could be relatively difficult. It is based on this that this study sets out to examine the impact of business education competencies on selected business enterprises in Somolu Local Government.