Factors Affecting Agricultural Graduate's Business Startup Competencies. Membering the Agricultural and Natural Resources Engineering Organization at Mazandaran Province

Raising agricultural graduate's unemployment and their inability to startup business and entrepreneurship is a crucial problem in Iran. The purpose of this study was to analyzing factors affecting agricultural graduate's business startup competencies. The statistical population consisted of all agriculture and natural resources, graduats during 2013-2016 in Mazandaran Province (N= 2550), among them 364 were randomaly selected based on Cochran Formula. The research instrument used was a questionnaire. Its validity was confirmed by a panel of experts and also its reliability was estimated to be θ= 0.912 using ordinal theta coeficient. In order to analyze the data, SPSSwin20 was used. The correlation tests, mann-whitney U and ordinal regression were used for data analysis. The results showed that, approximately 59 as percont of respondents ranked their business startup competencies at high and very high level. Appliying ordinal regression showed that, three variables including gender, education and character can estimate 67 percent of possibility of changing the dependent variable.