Best European Entrepreneurs Erasmus Project

Project Title

Best European Entrepreneurs

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Young Europeans are facing a complex labour market situation when they reach school-leaving age. Students in the age group of 14 to 16 years are also susceptible of leaving school too early before they acquire sufficient qualifications to ensure them enough job opportunities. Our transnational project “Best European Entrepreneurs” set out to motivate young learners to go through their formal education and, especially, help them gain knowledge, skills and self-confidence needed in the future. The project revolved around the concept of entrepreneurship, defined broadly as encompassing a set of skills and attitudes enabling a person to use their full potential.

The project engaged directly roughly 30 students and 8 teachers. In addition, many more students and their families were involved in the project as host families. The students in the project group came from diverse backgrounds. Some of them throve at school and had solid socio-economic status, but many had a more fragile socio-economic status, came from migrant families and/or had learning disabilities or other challenges at school. We especially wanted to support the latter groups by increasing their levels of awareness towards the skills necessary in entrepreneurship and in finding job opportunities.

The most important objective of the project was to improve the participants’ opportunities in life after they leave comprehensive school to study further and eventually enter working life by teaching them (about) job skills and by fostering an entrepreneurial attitude in them. In addition, the project aimed to improve the quality of the entrepreneurial studies. The project also aimed to develop participants’ communicative skills in English, as well as increase the sense of pride of the students’ knowledge of more than two languages, thus stressing the importance of multilingualism in the united Europe. Finally, the project aimed to improve the students’ ICT skills.

The activities of the project centered around organizing four project weeks involving student exchange and regular classes or club meetings in both schools between exchanges. The themes and activities of project weeks were designed to form a thematic progression and each project week built on the previous one(s). The first project week provided the participants with a glimpse to the life of an entrepreneur through visits, interviews and organizing a market, the second exchange focused on concrete job skills and competences, the third project week provided the participants with simulated experiences of applying for a job and of starting one’s own business, and during the final project week the students took stock of things they had learned and produced a digital guidebook about preparing to get a job. The activities carried out during the exchanges included visits and excursions, project work in small groups (e.g. interviews, presentations), lectures and workshops.
The methodologies employed within the “Best European Entrepreneurs” project included practical training, simulations, autonomous and collaborative learning and computer-mediated learning while working in transnational/national groups. We collaborated for instance with a wide range of local businesses, the local highschool in Järvenpää, local youth centres in both Järvenpää and Buchholz and Resofabrik Buchholz.

Perhaps the most important result of the project was the increase in participants’ self-confidence. This became evident in surveys carried out after project weeks and through teachers’ observations. For example, many students became more confident as users of English, many students showed remarkable initiative and resilience in new situations, some students found that they had leadership skills and some simply said they became more confident. Another outcome of the project which the students also found particularly valuable was getting to know another culture and gaining friends from abroad. In addition, the students gained better knowledge of entrepreneurship as a means of making a living but also as a committed attitude to work and studies. Their job skills also increased as they learned the different genres involved in applying for a job (e.g. drafting your cv, writing a cover letter, getting ready for and conducting oneself in an interview). They also became acquainted with new technologies, ranging from educational applications to programming and 3D-printing. All in all, we feel confident in saying that the students who participated in the project are all, in one way or another, better equipped for future than they were prior to the project.

The two schools also profited as institutions. We formed connections to local businesses and institutions and experimented with new methods of entrepreneurial education which will be incorporated into our schools’ practices. A digital guidebook for getting a job is a concrete outcome of the project, and it will be used and amended in both schools in years to come.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 56185 Eur

Project Coordinator

Kartanon koulu & Country: FI

Project Partners

• GOBS Waldschule Buchholz