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Guidance supporting Europe’s aspiring entrepreneurs
Policy and practice to harness future potential

investigate entrepreneurship as a broader concept, including awareness of
entrepreneurship as a career option and career aspirations of young and adult
learners. They should also explore broader entrepreneurial attitudes, skills and
competences.

Recommendations

Policy
A key starting point is the development of a policy agenda and associated policy
framework for guidance related to entrepreneurship learning, covering education
and training, employment and enterprise development, which promotes:
• entrepreneurship as a career option for all, to aid diversification in the
population of entrepreneurs;
• entrepreneurship as a mandatory element of the career guidance offer at all
levels, for all pupils and students, in all types of education and training;
• progressive and coordinated curricula for entrepreneurship education, where
basic skills are developed in primary and lower secondary education and are
further developed through upper secondary, IVET and HE, which is then taken
forward by individuals as they enter working life;
• training for career guidance professionals (and other education and training
professionals) to ensure they are equipped to support individuals in acquiring
entrepreneurial skills/competences.
As emphasised in the 2008 Council Resolution on better integrating lifelong
guidance into lifelong learning strategies, entrepreneurship guidance and
learning cannot operate in a vacuum: it has to be intrinsically linked to the
employment and enterprise development policy agendas.

Practice
As part of this policy framework, schools, VET and HE institutions need to be
encouraged to provide learning environments that develop students’
entrepreneurial skills and competences and embrace entrepreneurial principles
across the whole curriculum: developing initiative, confidence, self-efficacy,
creativity, responsibility and determination. Measures taken to support the
development of entrepreneurship skills and their application in the world of work
need to be complemented by appropriate start-up support.
Appropriate media need to be used to promote entrepreneurship to students
and workers interested in establishing their own businesses.

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