Promoting Entrepreneurial Competencies via Education: Is Malaysian Polytechnic Entrepreneurship Education Effective?

Abstract

Malaysian Polytechnic has been actively participating in providing entrepreneurship education (EE) and training to improve basic skills and encourage self-employment among its graduates. Sadly, a scrutiny of the available literature suggests that Malaysian polytechnic entrepreneurship education (MPEE) is ineffective as it fails to inculcate entrepreneurial spirit among the students. Students who have finished the MPEE were reported to have not embedded with enterprising knowledge, business skills and attributes during their study in polytechnics. However, these findings obviously demand further clarification. First, although entrepreneurship is indeed a very long process and cannot be created overnight, previous studies measured the effectiveness of MPEE by looking into students' readiness for entrepreneurship. Although scholars have argued that entrepreneurial readiness or intention is the proximal determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour, intention alone is not enough in measuring entrepreneurship as it does not lead to immediate action. Second, previous studies also missed to apply the regression method in their analysis to investigate the impact of MPEE on students' entrepreneurial development, leaving both theoretical and methodological gaps to be filled by the current study. Based on this justifications, this study proposes that the effectiveness of MPEE can be studied by looking at how it creates students' intellectual capital, which is the asset that are garnered from an investment in EE, and students' entrepreneurial behaviour via a longitudinal design. This effort is deemed important since understanding the effectiveness of MPEE will bring substantial value to the overall educational, economic, and societal well-being in the long run. The significance of this study lies in its effort to reveal the effectiveness of MPEE by investigating its impact on 'the other side' of entrepreneurial intention, which is its behavioural aspect.

Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy and Entrepreneurial Intention among Polytechnic Students Involved and Not Involved in Entrepreneurship Education

“…Hence, some questions arose, why did this happen? Some researchers even questioned whether the entrepreneurship modules offered in polytechnic institutions are still not effective [6,8] or are the teaching and learning syllabi used not suitable [7]. Are there any other factors that hinder this achievement?…”