By Angiating, Felicia Abiye
The purpose of this study was to investigate the entrepreneurial competencies required for engaging retirees in small and medium scale businesses. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. The population of the study was 11,698 retirees in Cross River State. Multistage sampling technique was adopted for the study. The sample for the study was 1,169 retirees. The instrument for data collection was 61 items structured questionnaire titled ‘entrepreneurial competencies required for engaging retirees in small and medium scale businesses for sustainable community development”. Modeled on a 4-points rating scale options of Strongly Agree (SA), Agree (A), Disagree (D) and Strongly Disagree (SD), with numerical values of 4, 3, 2, and 1 assigned to the responses. The instrument was validated by 3 experts. Crobach’s alpha was used to determine the internal consistency reliability of the instrument and was established at 0.721. The data collected was analyzed using mean and standard deviation for research questions and t-test statistics was used to analyze the hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance with the application of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). The findings include that: some of the small and medium scale businesses and entrepreneurial competencies required for retirees’ engagement are not accepted while some are accepted. It is therefore recommended that more small and medium scale businesses should be developed and established with the associated competencies required for the retired entrepreneurs.