Exploratory factor analysis of financial entrepreneurial competencies for technical college programs for a sustainable self-employment

Abstract

The study was aimed to explore and summarized Financial Entrepreneurial Competencies (FECs) through Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) for the development of a model for technical college programs in the North-West geo-political zone of Nigeria. The quantitative research approach was used to develop insight to stakeholders’ perspective: teachers and entrepreneurs. The study used survey questionnaires. The sample of the study involved 331 participants, including 249 technical college teachers and 82 SMEs entrepreneurs form the three states in the zone. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24, was used to analysed the data collected and a value of 0.72 Cronbach’s alpha was achieved. From the EFA, the study found that a three-factor structure is an appropriate method for describing the elements of FECs. Additionally, the value for KMO measure of sampling adequacy amount to 0.821 and the value for Bartlett’s test was significant at the 0.000 level this indicated that correlation between the variables are sufficiently large for factor analysis. The study also identified 61.99% as a total variance explained which is greater than the accepted threshold value. All the 12 items had a sizable inter-item correlation > 0.4, except FEC9 and FECP14 were eventually removed due to the complexity of the variable and were omitted in EFA. The study also highlights; it has been concluded FECs are worthy for inclusion into technical college programs as entrepreneurial competencies required by technical college students for self-employment in Nigeria.