Proposal for the establishment of a Vocational Training Master’s degree in Entrepreneurship
According to the latest “Global Entrepreneurship Monitor” reports,
the percentages of the Spanish population considering starting a business and/or already involved in entrepreneurial initiatives have grown in recent years, although they have done so slowly and remain significantly lower than those of the European Union.
These reports also highlight that
entrepreneurial education is the most relevant factor for promoting business creation: a lack of preparation negatively influences the development of entrepreneurial behaviors and is closely related to the expected viability of starting a business.
As expected, the data shows higher levels of entrepreneurship as the educational level increases, but also reveals lower motivation to start a business in vocational training (VT) compared to other educational levels.
The study “VT in the Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem,” prepared by the Caixabank Dualiza VT Observatory, confirms that
in recent years, the number of people aged 20 to 34 with a VT qualification who are self-employed has decreased.
It is evident that the efforts of the last decade to promote entrepreneurship in the field of VT, such as the teaching of the Business and Entrepreneurial Initiative module or the Creation and Management of Micro-enterprises professional certificate, among others, have not generated the expected impact on the motivation and capacity to start a business.
The new organization of vocational training, which unifies formal VT and VT for employment,
insists on the importance of entrepreneurship by proposing new actions within the framework of training cycles, including:
- Updating the introductory and awareness-raising content for entrepreneurship in the mandatory Personal Itineraries for Employability modules.
- The incorporation of a new optional module, Deepening Entrepreneurship, with a very short duration of between 40 and 80 hours.
- The implementation of measures complementary to training, such as personalized professional guidance itineraries or the commitment to promote practical entrepreneurship classrooms or business incubators, yet to be defined, among others.
Despite the implementation of these new actions, the impact of which will not be evaluable for a few years, if a significant impact on the capacity of VT students to start a business is truly desired, it is necessary to establish a new specialized and advanced training program.
This new specialized and advanced training program in entrepreneurship should meet the following requirements:
- Have the primary objective of training students to undertake a professional or business activity on a self-employed basis.
- Be aimed at VT students who show genuine motivation to start a business, and who preferably already have an initial business idea.
- Be cross-disciplinary in nature, so that it can be taken by students with a VT qualification from different professional families.
- Be scheduled independently of the training cycles, facilitating the full dedication of students at the most appropriate time in their professional career.
- Have the necessary and sufficient duration to effectively train students to create new companies.
- Include specific content related to the entrepreneurial process: ideation, modeling, prototyping, and validation.
- Focus on the development of entrepreneurial competencies, based on the Entrecomp model, the European reference model.
- Have a modern methodological approach, using agile methodologies for entrepreneurship: design thinking, effectuation, lean startup, etc.
- Complement the new actions proposed by the new VT organization, generating a flow of users for the entrepreneurship classrooms and business incubators.
Autoocupació promotes the establishment of a new specialization course in Entrepreneurship to ensure that, ultimately, VT becomes a school for entrepreneurs who create companies, economic activity, and employment, and can say with pride,
I am what I want to be.
