Entrepreneurship Education in Technical Colleges: A Case Study

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1 Entrepreneurship Education in Technical Colleges: A Case Study Gosekwang Setibi, and Herbert Mapfaira Abstract The government of Botswana, through its economy diversification strategy, has been promoting the diversification of the economy into different sectors to stop over-reliance on the diamond sub-sector. It invited various institutions to contribute in harnessing and building entrepreneurship capacity within the country. The Ministry of Education and Skills Development responded by introducing Entrepreneurship education in technical colleges as a core subject. By introducing entrepreneurship education, the government hopes to promote an entrepreneurship culture among students and thus prepare them for self-employment upon graduation from college. However, upon graduation, students rarely choose selfemployment as a means of employment. The main objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of the entrepreneurship programme and to ascertain possible reasons why self-employment is not being taken as an employment option. Results indicate that the Entrepreneurship education programme is not adequately equipping the students with the relevant practical skills on how to start and run a business. Keywords Entrepreneurship, employment, entrepreneurship characteristics, entrepreneurship barriers. E I. INTRODUCTION NTREPRENEURSHIP is at the heart of economic growth of any nation. It is a major source of innovation, enterprise productivity, and employment. Entrepreneurship has also been identified as a mechanism by which many people enter the society s economic and social mainstream, aiding culture formation, population integration, and social mobility[1]. Entrepreneurship has also been described as the ability to envision and chart a course for a new business venture by combining information from the functional disciplines and from the external environment in the context of the extraordinary uncertainty and ambiguity which faces a new business venture [2]. It manifests itself in creative strategies, innovative tactics, uncanny perception of trends and market mood changes, courageous leadership when the way forward is not obvious and so on. Entrepreneurship has thus been defined as the study of the sources of opportunities; the process of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities [3]. The government of Botswana has formulated a number of Gosekwang Setibi is with the Department of Management, University of Botswana, Botswana (phone: ; fax: ; gosekwang.setibi@mopipi.ub.bw). Herbert Mapfaira is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Botswana, Botswana. (*corresponding author phone.: ; fax: ) * Herbert.Mapfaira@mopipi.ub.bw national policies to promote the growth and development of the economy. One key national policy is the Vision 2016, which is a strategy for economic diversification [4]. The attainment of the Vision 2016 key pillars (goals) for attaining Prosperity for all through an Educated and Informed Nation as well as A Prosperous, Productive and Innovative Nation depends on the country expanding its productive capacity. To achieve these goals requires the diversification of the economy with all the productive sectors of the economy making a substantial contribution. To implement the Vision 2016 Strategy, the government introduced the Economic Diversification Drive initiative. One of the objectives of the initiative is to develop an entrepreneurship culture for business growth and enhanced citizen participation in the economy. [5]. To facilitate this objective, the government of Botswana has implemented aggressive strategies aimed at cultivating and nurturing entrepreneurship. Over the past decade the government has been on a mission to diversify its economy by encouraging and supporting setting up of new enterprises in different sectors of the economy. Various stakeholders have been called to make an input towards this goal. The Department of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (DTVET), under the Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD) also took part in this national plea by introducing new programmes which would address the problem. The result was the creation of the Botswana Technical Education Programme (BTEP), a new vocational education programme. The programme is designed to produce graduates who are trainable, employable and have the ability and initiative to start and run their own businesses. BTEP courses are provided at Foundation, Certificate, Advanced Certificate and Diploma. Graduates of this programme are trained in vital employability and entrepreneurship skills. It is hoped that this will equip the students to venture into entrepreneurial activities after graduation from college, thereby diversifying the economy. However, in practice, graduates from technical colleges are not opting for self-employment, preferring to job hunt instead. This trend seems to be widespread in other institution of higher education, as research carried out by the University of Botswana, when 135 Faculty of Business undergraduates were asked about their career aspirations only 7 (5.2%) mentioned entrepreneurship as a viable career [6]. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the entrepreneurship programme under BTEP and to ascertain possible reasons why self-employment is not being taken as an employment option. The research used Selebi-Phikwe Technical College (SPTECO) as a case study. This college is located in Selebi- 40

2 Phikwe town, one of the mining towns in the central region of Botswana. Selebi Phikwe town is faced with a challenge of copper and nickel getting extinct. All organisations in Selebi- Phikwe have a challenge of finding ways of resuscitating the town besides depending on mineral resources. SPTECO is one of the nine technical colleges in Botswana. It is a government controlled non-profit making organisation aiming at meeting a need of skills transfer in the country. SPTECO, together with the other nine technical and vocational colleges operate under the Department of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (DTVET) and they all offer the same entrepreneurship education programme. II. METHODOLOGY The study used structured interviews and survey data obtained from a Technical and Vocational college, SPTECO. The data collection instrument was piloted to ensure a good response rate. An inductive research approach is used. As no hypothesis is being tested, the data collected and analyzed is used to arrive at the recommendations. The approach is more suitable as it enables the researchers to get the feel of why majority of graduates are not becoming self-employed regardless of their vast skills and experiences. An inductive research helps in getting a better understanding on what is causing low numbers of entrepreneurial activities. Inductive research does not construct a rigid methodology therefore it permits alternative explanations of what is going on. Secondary data comprised literature such as books, reports, studies and internet. Even though the researchers are focusing on inductive approach, deductive approach is used as well to see if there is a link between self-employment and certain trades or courses and if gender somehow is a determining factor to whether Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) graduates become self-employed. A questionnaire is chosen as the most appropriate tool for the research questions and objectives. Questionnaire usually works best with standardized questions that can be interpreted the same way by all respondents [7]. Questionnaires therefore tend to be used for descriptive or explanatory research. Probability sampling (or representative sampling) was used in this research. This is most commonly associated with survey-based research strategies where one need to make inferences from sample about a population to answer research questions or to meet objectives. The sampling frame of the research at hand is a list of all Selebi-Phikwe Technical College (SPTECO) learners. The sampling frame is valid and reliable since class register lists were used. Stratified random sampling is used in the current research. This sampling method is a modification of random sampling in which one divide the population into two or more relevant and significant strata based on one or a number of attributes. In effect, the sampling frame is divided into a number of subsets. A random sample (simple or systematic) is then drawn from each of the strata. The population of this research encompasses SPTECO students from eight departments and staff members from eight departments. A stratification variable is department. For each department there must be male and female students; Lecturer and a Technical Assistant. That is, students will be stratified using department and gender whilst staff members will be stratified using designation. Sample size that was used is 196 out of a population of 300. The expected error rate is 5% [8]. The limitations of this research are time and resources. Furthermore fourth year students were not in college during the time of the research, they could have given more value adding information. Using one college as a case study to represent all colleges is also a limitation. III. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS TABLE 1 GENDER OF RESPONDENTS Out of 200 questionnaires that were distributed, 196 were completed and returned for data analysis. Female students constituted 54% of total respondents. The results thus indicate that women are more enrolled in BTEP programmes as compared to their male counterparts. This may be due to the fact that majority of courses in operation are favoured by female students, courses such as Textiles, Beauty Therapy and Hairdressing. Age distribution of the respondents is important to note. This will enable the researchers to know whether respondents are youth or old [9]. The Botswana government entrepreneurial support programmes target youth, that is, the age group. Table 1 shows the age groups of the respondents. TABLE II AGE OF RESPONDENTS The results show that % of TVET students qualify for all financial support programmes available in Botswana. These are the very people who have been hit hard by unemployment rate. TABLE III SPONSORING BODY 41

3 Table 3 shows the sponsoring bodies for the students. Major sponsors of TVET students are private companies and the Department of Tertiary Education Fund (DTEF). Among the programmes offered by Technical and Vocational colleges is the National Craft Certificate (NCC). All NCC courses are sponsored by private companies and students on these courses are expected to work for the sponsoring companies after completing their studies. The company sponsorship for NCC students means the sponsored students do not consider the option of self-employment because they have signed a contract with their sponsor. This arrangement does not harness entrepreneurial spirit amongst TVET students. As shown on Table 4, 41 % of these students are sponsored by private companies in exchange for employment after acquiring relevant skills. TABLE IV SPONSORING BODY Frequency Percentage Parents Company Self 2 1 DTEF Table 4 also shows that 46% of TVET students are sponsored by DTEF. These students are expected to repay their student loan in a reasonable time after completing their studies. This has a possibility of influencing graduates to seek for employment so that they earn a regular income to pay the loan regularly. TABLE V ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS Entrepreneurial skills Frequency Percentage Marketing Financial Opportunity Identification Decision Making and Problem solving As shown in table 5, the majority of respondents (74-84%) showed that they have entrepreneurial skills and qualities such as marketing a product, preparing financial statements, spotting a business opportunity, perseverance, decision making and problem solving. This does not come as a surprise because all TVET students undergo entrepreneurial training. The big question now is why they are not venturing into businesses? These results indicate that entrepreneurial skills and qualities are not sufficient to enable people to venture into entrepreneurship a supportive environment is needed for people to venture into entrepreneurship. Table 6 shows that students do not believe that the entrepreneurship education fosters networks and contacts with entrepreneurship ventures (26 % strongly disagree, 37% disagree). This may indicate that the delivery style of the course seem to be focused on theory and ignoring the business network aspect. If learners are to be entrepreneurs, they need to be exposed to real entrepreneurs who can act as their mentors. By so doing students will acknowledge the reality of entrepreneurship, which minimizes the fear of failure that may be blocking some graduates from considering selfemployment as an employment option. TABLE VI FOSTERS NETWORKS AND CONTACTS WITH ENTREPRENEURSHIP VENTURES Ratings Frequency Percentage Strongly Disagree Disagree Neutral 54 Agree 15 8 Strongly Agree 5 2 Networking is very important in entrepreneurship; it determines the effectiveness of a business venture. Students have highlighted the inability to access capital for start-ups. Seeing is learning, exposing students to people who have some of the funding programmes around Botswana, will enable sharing of the challenges associated with accessing funding and how to overcome them. TABLE VII REASONS WHY TVET STUDENTS ARE NOT CHOOSING SELF- EMPLOYMENT AFTER GRADUATING Reasons Frequency Percentage Inadequate skills Lack of capital Low self esteem Lack of location No experience Insufficient information Laziness Strong competition Other reasons Table 7 provides reasons given by TVET graduates for not opting for self-employment after graduating. The reasons outlined by the respondents above are personal but yet valid and cannot be disputed against. The whole approach towards facilitation of entrepreneurship education in technical colleges is not suitable. The content of the module used currently has not been benchmarked against best practice. The Entrepreneurship syllabus is in serious need of a review to include the world standard entrepreneurship education. TVET students claim that the entrepreneurship programme is not adequately equipping them with necessary practical skills to start and run a business. Facilitators of the programme need to be aware that this unit is as practical as any vocational course and start planning for practical activities. Also facilitators need to be exposed to the world of Businesses so that they preach what they practice. The time given to entrepreneurship unit is also inadequate. Generally entrepreneurship education aims to increase the awareness of entrepreneurship as a career option, and enhance the understanding of the process involved in initiating and managing a new business enterprise [10]-[11]. The literature calls for a balance between academics and practitioners, known as teamwork teaching in the delivery of entrepreneurship education [12]. Currently SPTECO 42

4 practices facilitation of theory of Entrepreneurship course. There is a need for SPTECO to form partnerships with established Entrepreneurs to help in the facilitation of entrepreneurship modules in college, as guest presenters. This issue was further supported by the findings of the current research where by learners felt that they would gain much understanding if they were involved in the actual practice of entrepreneurship rather than theory only. Identifying target market for entrepreneurship education is important. As observed in the findings some learners are not really interested in starting their own businesses, they simply would like to enhance their knowledge of the field of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a field that is very popular and rapidly growing in the present day [13]. Educators of entrepreneurship should be aware that they are offering their services to all interested parties including to those who have no direct intention to become entrepreneurs because these non-interested groups may very well provide the supporting base to existing and potential entrepreneurs. However it is important that the entrepreneurship curricula match the need of different participants, not the current generic syllabus. Past studies have shown that entrepreneurs are often reluctant to participate in the courses offered by local colleges and university because they perceived that these courses are too theoretical and academically oriented 14]. For example, in response to the possible mismatch between the expectations of undergraduate students and the business community, McCarthy et al, proposed an entrepreneurship program that enhances the real-life practical experiences of these students while providing assistance to the businesses that are struggling with post start-up problems. Their proposed model aimed at benefiting both the undergraduates and the business community. The same approach would be very beneficial to SPTECO and other technical colleges in the country. As much as the findings indicate that the content of entrepreneurship unit in SPTECO does not equip learners with all relevant skills related to entrepreneurship venturing, literature indicates that some of those skills are acquired through hands on practice. SPTECO has to partner with organizations such as Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) and practice both classroom and field training. Increasing the time frame of entrepreneurship course in SPTECO is nonnegotiable if the course is to be effective. An issue of lack of finance keeps on popping up as one of the reasons for TVET graduates not to venture into entrepreneurship activities. One might wonder why this is still a reason when there are so many funding agencies in Botswana. Funding agencies in Botswana only fund a project with a good business proposal. Learners are sometimes lazy, as claimed by some respondents, to compile a good proposal or at times their skills are insufficient to wow the funding institution. Practical training can help technical colleges learners fully acquire some of the skills that theory alone is unable to provide. There is a need for technical colleges to partner with funding agencies during facilitation of entrepreneurship unit until completion of the unit by each group. This will allow the funding agencies to expose the students to mechanics of preparing funding bids. IV. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS The entrepreneurship field has gained considerable momentum over the years in Botswana. Colleges and universities are realizing the need to develop entrepreneurs who will boost the country s economy. The aim of the research at hand is to recommend to DTVET the strategy to be adopted to make TVET a key factor in producing entrepreneurs and what promotional strategies have to be put in place to achieve the underlying strategy. SPTECO is one of the technical colleges offering entrepreneurship education in Botswana. Regardless of all the effort being put in the Entrepreneurship Programme by various stakeholders, the output is not visible; TVET graduates are not opting for self-employment as their first choice. Some TVET graduates even spend years searching for jobs and not exploring self-employment as an employment option. This has been a concern for the Ministry of Education and Skills Development over the years. The results of the research show that learners are interested in entrepreneurship venture creations, the problem is that they are not equipped with sufficient skills to set up and run a business. Learners also lack the skills to write the relevant documents required to bid for financing from the bodies that support aspiring entrepreneurs. The results indicate adisconnect between what the programme is supposed to achieve and what it is achieving. Based on the analysis and conclusions of this research paper, a number of recommendations for DTVET are summarized below: The Entrepreneurship syllabus needs to be reviewed to ensure that it captures best practice and more specifically to incorporate a practical element to the course. A practical element to the course will enhance the real-life practical experiences of the students. Staff facilitating the entrepreneurship programme needs to be exposed to the world of Businesses to allow them to acquire relevant entrepreneurship skills so that they preach what they practice. This will also make them credible when delivering to students, since the students can view them as role models. The time allocated to the entrepreneurship programme should be increased to allow inclusion of other activities like field trips to business incubators and other practicing and successful entrepreneurs. There is a need for Technical and Vocation colleges to form partnerships with established Entrepreneurs and agencies that support budding entrepreneurs like the Local Enterprise Authority to help in the facilitation of entrepreneurship modules in colleges, as guest presenters, and also to act as mentors. There is a need for technical and vocational colleges to partner with funding agencies inn the facilitation of the entrepreneurship programme. This will expose the 43

5 students to the practicalities of developing project proposals good enough to attract funding. REFERENCES [1] Hisrich, R., Langan-Fox, J., & Grant, S. (2007). Entrepreneurship research and practice: A call to action for psychology. American Psychologist, 62(6), [2] Shepherd, D. A. and E. J. Douglas (1997). Is management education developing, or killing, the entrepreneurial spirit? United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference, San Francisco, CA. [3] Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), [4] Vision 2016 Council, (2009). Botswana Performance Report, Lentswel la Lesedi, Gaborone. [5] Botswana Government, (2011). Economic Diversification Drive: the Key to Sustainable Economic Growth and a Vibrant Globally Competitive Private Sector [5]. [6] Plattner, I. E., Lechaena, M., & Mmolawa, W. (2009). Are University Students Psychologically Ready for Entrepreneurship? A Botswana Study. African Journal of Business Management, [7] Robson C (2002). Real World Research. Blackwell, (2nd edition) [8] Saunders M. and Thornhill A.(2009) Research methods for business students.5 th ed. Hallow, Pearson Education Limited. [9] Zindiye, S. (2008). An empirical investigation into the factors affecting the performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in the manufacturing sector of Harare: Zimbabwe. Fort Hare University. [10] Hills, G. E. & Shrader, R. C. (1998). Successful Entrepreneurs Insights Into Opportunity Recognition. Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research, Babson College: [11] Donckels, R. (1991), `Education and Entrepreneurship Experiences from Secondary and University Education in Belgium', JSBE, 9(1), pp [12] McMullan, W. E., and Long, W. A. (1987), `Entrepreneurship Education in the Nineties', JBV, 2(3), pp [13] Block, Z. and Stumpf, S.A. (1992), Entrepreneurship education research: experience and challenge, in Sexton, D.L. and Kasarda, J.D. (Eds), The State of the Art of Entrepreneurship, PWS-Kent Publishing Company, Boston, MA, pp [14] McCarthy, A., Morris, P.J., and Winn, J., 1997, A New Look At Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Education. Proceedings of USABE Annual National Conference Entrepreneurship: The Engine of Global Economic Development. San Francisco, California. 44