Assessment of Critical Entrepreneurial Skills Possessed By Small Scale Business Operators in Delta State of Nigeria

This study assessed the opinions of small scale business operators in Delta state of Nigeria on ethical and moral and interpersonal skills they possessed. The problem of the study is that small scale businesses in Delta State are either not doing well or have failed. The design of the study was survey method and the area of study is Delta State of Nigeria. The population consists of all the 984 small scale business operators in Delta state who were registered by the Ministry of Commerce and Industries. A sample of 625 registered small scale business operators from the 25 LGAs in the state were used for the study. Two research questions guided the study and two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. Questionnaire was the instrument used for data collection. The validity of the instrument was established by experts in business education while the cronbach alpha reliability method was used which yielded a coefficient index of 0.94. Data collected were analyzed using mean ratings, z-test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA). From the results of the analysis of the data, it was discovered that ethics and moral skills and interpersonal relation skills were rated as highly possessed by small business operators in the state. Small scale business operators did not differ significantly in their mean ratings of the extent they possessed ethics and moral skills as a result of their sex. However, they differed significantly in their mean rating of the extent they possessed interpersonal relation skills as a result of their years of operation. Based on the results, it was recommended that curriculum planners should incorporate the identified entrepreneurship skills in the curriculum of entrepreneurship programmes both at the secondary and tertiary levels of Business Education so that prospective entrepreneurs could effectively manage their enterprises. It was also recommended that irrespective of the course of study at any tertiary institution, entrepreneurship training should be integrated so that the level of business failure could be minimized. Furthermore, it was recommended that workshops and seminars should be organized for operators of small scale business owners by the agencies responsible for the development of small scale businesses at all levels of government to create in-depth knowledge and technical know-how on the identified entrepreneurship skills.