The Influence of Selected Factors toward Entrepreneurial Career Aspirations among Students of Community Colleges

Nowadays, the Malaysian government has implemented various measures towards encouraging student's participation in entrepreneurship career. The Graduate's Tracer Study Report by the Ministry of Education, however, indicates that most of the Malaysian graduates prefer to be job seekers than become an entrepreneur. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to identify the influence of the selected factors toward entrepreneurial career aspirations among the students of community colleges. The selected factors in this study are attitude towards entrepreneurship, subjective norm, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial exposure. Cluster random sampling method was used to select 265 community college students from Kedah, Pahang and Perak. The instrument used was modified based on several sources of past studies and had gone through a content validity process. The instrument has a reliability value with a Cronbach a value between 0.75 to 0.91. Based on the multiple regression analysis, the combination of the four selected factors contributed 39% to the entrepreneurial career aspirations among the students of community colleges. This shows that the all four independent variables has a moderate impact on student entrepreneurship career aspirations and about 60% are contributed by other variables. It is recommended that future studies to be conducted looking into the influence of other variables towards entrepreneurial career aspirations among the students of community colleges. This study also reported that attitude toward entrepreneurship has a significant influence on entrepreneurial career aspirations, whereas subjective norm, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial exposure were found to have no significant influence on entrepreneurial career aspirations. This indicates that if the students have a positive perception toward the benefits and outcomes of entrepreneurial career, they are more likely to choose an entrepreneurial career. This study suggests that in order to produce students with entrepreneurial career aspirations, more focus is needed on developing positive attitudes towards entrepreneurial career among students.