Page 29 - guidance-supporting-europe-s-aspiring-entrepreneurs-policy-and-practice-to-harness-future-potential
P. 29
Guidance supporting Europe’s aspiring entrepreneurs
Policy and practice to harness future potential
organisations to activity in this field. However, such commitment is not evident
uniformly across Europe. International organisations such as Ja-Ye and
EuroPEN have also made significant investments and their role in the provision
of entrepreneurship education has been immense.
Future challenges
It is important to recognise that it would be a significant task to create universal
access to entrepreneurship education and guidance. Ensuring that teachers
involved in entrepreneurship education are trained/retrained and supported to
apply the experiential, hands-on approach required to deliver entrepreneurship
education, and have access to guidance materials to support their work, is a
major task. While most countries offer teachers some level of training on
entrepreneurship, this is generally provided by external organisations and
delivered on an ad-hoc basis: it is less likely to be part of a coherent, systematic
approach to entrepreneurship training delivery. Looking forward, guidance
professionals will also need to be equipped with information and skills about the
career opportunities offered by entrepreneurship.
The role of guidance is also limited by the fact that guidance professionals
currently have limited contacts with the business world and real entrepreneurs
are not adequately included in the promotion of entrepreneurship as a career
option in all IVET and HE institutions (though significant development has taken
place). Despite a growing focus on entrepreneurship and a range of awareness-
raising activities having been implemented, many students are still not always
aware of entrepreneurship as a career option. Evidence indicates that many
students still prefer more traditional employment positions rather than self-
employment.
Significant anecdotal evidence is available to support the positive effects of
guidance-related interventions discussed in this report, but empirical and
longitudinal studies are less commonly available. This report has provided
examples of evaluation results which are mainly linked to the results of mini-
companies, mentoring initiatives and the activities of some individual universities.
Demonstrating the impact of specific entrepreneurial learning activities, as
well as the impact of formal guidance related to entrepreneurship, is a key
challenge. Impact assessment and evaluation work in this field is hampered by a
lack of commonly accepted indicators for success. Most often, entrepreneurship-
related support programmes are evaluated on the basis of academic knowledge
about entrepreneurship, academic performance more generally, business
formation and wealth generation, and personal values and aspirations (Volkmann
et al., 2009). If the guidance value is to be included, such evaluations should
23