IDENTIFYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TECHNICAL ENGINEERING GRADUATES’ COMPETENCIES AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT WITH THE MEDIATION OF ENGINEERING PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

The present study was conducted with the aim of testing the causal relationship between the competencies of engineering science graduates and entrepreneurship with the mediating role of engineering professional ethics. The research method was applied and in terms of data collection, it was descriptive of correlation type. The statistical population was all the students of Technical and Engineering Faculties of Tehran University, 306 of whom were selected by stratified random sampling. In order to collect data, entrepreneurship questionnaires, engineering professional ethics and researcher-made questionnaires of competencies required by engineering science graduates were used. The validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by using the content validity of the construct and their reliability with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The data were analyzed using regression coefficient tests and structural equation models. The results showed that the entrepreneurship status of students is directly and indirectly affected by the predictor variables of professional ethics and learned competencies. Also all the components are reported as favorable and very favorable and the data model has a good fit, so the hypothesis of “the assumed model of the causal relationship between the competencies required by the graduates of engineering sciences and entrepreneurship with the mediation of professional ethics” has been confirmed.