Entrepreneurial competency and self-efficacy among the agricultural graduates of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University

Nurturing entrepreneurship among students has become an important issue in universities as well as in other such organizations. For getting into the entrepreneurial society it is very important to have entrepreneurial competencies. Therefore this study attempted to investigate the entrepreneurial competencies and career self-efficacy among the agricultural students. Data were collected from 250 UG agricultural students of all the campuses of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University viz Coimbatore, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai and Killikulam. The entrepreneurial competencies were analyzed using factor analysis and the results comprised three dimensions such as management competency, opportunity competency and personal competency. In case of career self-efficacy, 70 per cent of the sample students had medium level of career self-efficacy followed by 18 per cent having low level. Among these management competency (F= 64.301) and opportunity competency (F= 58.953) were found to be important dimensions in discriminating the two groups such as students with low and high career self-efficacy. Therefore efforts must be made to improve the managerial competency among the students and they may be offered the personality development programmes as their career development process.