Project background
Entrepreneurship is a topic of increasing importance across all EU member states. Its importance for economic growth, employment and social cohesion is widely recognized since the Lisbon European Council in 2000. More recently, in its Europe 2020 strategy, the European Commission highlights entrepreneurship as one of the key factors enabling smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Entrepreneurship is not only a driving force for job creation, competitiveness and growth, but it also contributes to personal fulfillment and achievement of social objectives.
The importance of entrepreneurship skills in the context of Vocational Education and Training has been pointed out in CEDEFOPs report “Trends in VET policy in Europe 2010-12” The paper shows some successful entrepreneurship examples – e.g Training of entrepreneurs in Portugal; also in the other countries from the project consortium – websites for teachers’ entrepreneurship support in Germany, accredited entrepreneurship programmes in Slovakia, EU funded entrepreneurship training to unemployed people in Bulgaria, etc.
Despite the fact that all countries have developed various entrepreneurial programmes and initiatives, a lack of implementation strategy can still be observed, as the topic is still seldom a part of a VET programme or governmental-funded courses. Thus the entrepreneurship could be referred as a weak reference in the curricula of the educational system across EU.
In this sense the current project will try to complement the already started national activities by transferring good practices from successful countries as Portugal and striving to promote entrepreneurial mind-set among learners in VET and in labour-market courses.