Improving the Engineering Students’ Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy through a Specialised Course – A Way to Improve Startup Management

Abstract

Entrepreneurial self-efficacy is considered a reliable indicator of the entrepreneurial intentions. In order to measure the entrepreneurial self-efficacy, several scales were developed. These scales are used also to measure the efficiency of entrepreneurship study programmes, but were not used for individual courses until now. This paper presents the results of application of an entrepreneurial self-efficacy scale to measure the increase of entrepreneurial self-efficacy of engineering students after completing an entrepreneurship course in a technical university. The course lead to a significant increase of entrepreneurial self-efficacy overall, but also on all considered factors and items. It was observed a gender difference at the beginning of the course and also a gender difference in the increase of self-efficacy. An interesting finding was that for a certain factor it was noted a regress in self-efficacy for few students. Because those students thought the process was simpler than it is in reality and after acknowledging the complexity of the process, they felt unconfident.

Keywords

• entrepreneurial self-efficacy scale
• entrepreneurship course
• startup management