ABSTRACT
Industry 4.0 has created several opportunities such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) etc., but still unemployment has become the biggest matter of concern before developing countries, especially in India, where the number of educated people are continuously rising, but in comparison, employment is not being generated. Also looking at the lakhs of engineering undergraduates finishing their education every year and seeking jobs for survival, the present study attempted to identify the entrepreneurial characteristics, attitude, and self-employment intention among engineering undergraduates of Chhattisgarh state. Stratified random sampling was applied to collated primary data of 1,000 participants enrolled in the 3rd and 4th year of their technical courses in different government/private technical institutes. Smart PLS (trial version) and SPSS (licensed version) was applied to analyse the data. The outcome revealed that entrepreneurial characteristics and attitudes were found to be statistically significant, whereas self-employment intention did not provide the same. The findings suggest that the government and concerned authorities such as educational institutions should emphasize structural changes and produce some appropriate policies to nurture engineering undergraduates’ characteristics and attitudes for starting up new business in the times of Industry 4.0, and should exploit this opportunity in building a pool of future entrepreneurs.
