This is why I have made entrepreneurship education the central priority of my work to ensure that young people acquire better skills and Member States successfully modernise their education systems. Students who do an entrepreneurship course, and especially those who experience hands-on practical activities, gain skills that help them innovate, communicate, think critically and, most importantly, navigate their professional and social lives.
It is important to stress that entrepreneurship education is not only about promoting start-ups, it is about creative thinking, risk taking and turning ideas into action. An entrepreneurial mindset needs to be cultivated from a young age. Yet, only 34% of young Europeans have participated in an entrepreneurship class. At the same time, those who take part tend to achieve highly positive results: they are less likely to drop out of school or become unemployed and are more likely to start a business.
So what are we waiting for? The European Commission has been supporting teaching entrepreneurship and will keep doing so. For example, the Erasmus+ programme funds highly innovative projects on mini-companies in several Member States. My goal is to build on this and boost entrepreneurship education for all young Europeans.
The success of JA alumni is only one example showing why entrepreneurship must be promoted as a core educational element. If every young pupil has at least one practical entrepreneurial experience before leaving school, future generations will be better decision makers, problem solvers and well prepared to enter the job market. And be more confident, independent citizens. Thus, we need to maximise entrepreneurship education at all levels, especially in schools and VET institutions, to make sure that no pupil is excluded from entrepreneurial learning.
JA is one of the leading organisations in this field and thanks to its tireless efforts and unmatched expertise, it has considerably improved entrepreneurship education in Europe, helping many Europeans to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills. I encourage you to keep up your efforts to reach an even greater number of young participants in the future, setting up innovative projects and continuing to expand the network of JA alumni. We count on you, more than ever, to keep on spreading entrepreneurial mentality and skills in the EU.” job_position=”By Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”6776″ bio_image_url=”6776″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”How entrepreneurial education changed the life of Karoli Hindriks, Founder and CEO of Jobbatical” team_member_bio=”At the age of nineteen, Karoli Hindriks, from a small town in Estonia, was speaking in front of the European Parliament on behalf of young European entrepreneurs. She is now the founder and a CEO of a year-old startup Jobbatical spanning already across forty countries with team members from nine countries. Read more about Karoli’s entrepreneurship education experience.
I was born in the Soviet Union and was an average student at an average school—not exactly set up for success. My home town of Pärnu was tiny, with 40,000 inhabitants—a village by most of the world’s standards. At sixteen I was given a school assignment to create a student company with my classmates. It was part of the Junior Achievement Young Enterprise economical study program that my school had joined.
Excited about this out-of-the-blue opportunity to feel important and business-like, I came up with an idea for a product: a reflective accessory that looks cool and makes clothing visible to cars in the dark (in hindsight, they were initially neither particularly cool nor able to survive a rainy day…).
I rushed home to share my excitement with my parents. The way I see it now, given the circumstances, they could have responded in either of these two ways:
1) The easy option was to remind me that I had no education, was born and raised in a remote post-Soviet country that the world had never heard of, and thus had no background for success. It would have been reasonable for them, as parents, to ask their daughter to focus on getting better grades, following the traditional dotted line to success.
2) Their second option was to encourage me to believe that my ideas could make a difference if I worked hard on executing them.
I was lucky enough to have parents who helped me believe in my own superpowers. It was my dad who suggested I take my idea to the patent office (that’s when I learned what that even meant!) and start finding clients. I opened the yellow pages catalogue (this was before the era of Google, of course) and found both — the patent office where I patented my idea, and my future customers.
A few years later I had sold hundreds of thousands of my little life-saving reflectors across Northern Europe. At the age of nineteen I was speaking in the European Parliament on behalf of young European entrepreneurs.
Today I am the founder and a CEO of a year-old startup Jobbatical spanning already across forty countries with team members from nine countries.
My father passed away a few years after my high school, but his support, together with Junior Achievement, had opened a door for me for which I am ever thankful. This is a door that exists in all of us. It’s the door to the greatest superpower of them all — the belief that you can make a change. I hope we can help open millions of these doors across Europe by mixing and matching our experience and knowledge on the Board of Directors of Junior Achievement Young Enterprise.”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”6778″ bio_image_url=”6778″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”Girls in Management- Kaisa’s experience” team_member_bio=”Kaisa Lervik is from Norway. She is Analytics Talent Community Lead. Last winter, she got involved with Ungt Entreprenorskap (JA Norway) to lend her expertise during the programme “Girls in Management”. She shared her views on the experience
– I think it’s important to start thinking about how you want to make an impact from an early age, and it seems that JA is about giving young people a mindset and tools to do just that. Having entrepreneurs in Norway when the oil runs out will be very important, and we need to educate young people on how to manage a business, not just have great ideas.
We want to see tomorrow’s leaders, and give them an opportunity to learn about using technology (our expertise) to the best for their future companies.
The future is always changing, but probably quicker now than just a few decades ago. But running and leading a business is not changing as fast, and learning the skills now will enable them to run successful businesses in most new conditions.
What I enjoyed most from this volunteering experience was meeting young women who are eager to learn about technology and how to use it to lead their businesses smarter and more effectively.-“][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”6782″ bio_image_url=”6782″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”Preparing children to be engaged and responsible global citizens” team_member_bio=”Armando Persico, a teacher in Italy, has a dream: to improve the teaching profession and offer apprenticeship and entrepreneurship opportunities to all students.
I have a dream… to improve the teaching profession and offer apprenticeship and entrepreneurship opportunities to all students.
As a coordinator of the Italian version of the ‘dual system apprenticeship’ model, I introduced the first Italian vocational ‘management’ path. This is an exciting challenge for the Ikaros Foundation vocational schools where I work. My role is to coordinate 250 younger colleagues (regardless of their subjects) and introduce them to teaching entrepreneurship and providing training.
Together with teachers from those schools, we involve more than 2,000 students, from secondary vocational and university level education, in the following areas of study: business, ICT, electrical, electronic, hairdressing, cosmetology, culinary, pastry-making, agricultural, mechanical, graphic design and logistics.
At Ikaros Foundation, we are committed to reviving and promoting the vocational education system. We aim to make it evolve from being a ‘last resort’ choice before students join the ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ (NEET) club – as it is the Italian tradition – to a conscious and positive choice. The so-called ‘artisan revival’ pathway is now facilitated thanks to an improved professional teachers’ development and entrepreneurship education. It’s a fantastic pioneering model of excellence in Lombardy and easily extended to all of Italy.
I also have another important dream. I would like to establish a Foundation (together with local and national bodies) to promote the creation of start-ups by focusing on three specific target groups: vocational schools, students and people in need. Its objective would be to allocate, for a decade, 10,000 EUR annually to 10 Italian vocational schools. Those schools will be selected based on their offerings of specialised courses in the field of ‘human services’. The money will be used to provide tools and raw materials to the start-ups created by the students. Their startup will be in line with their field of study and will benefit disadvantaged people in the area, at affordable rates.
This foundation represents a win-win solution for everyone! Students wil gain new entrepreneurial and technical skills, will learn how to run a business and may even make a small profit for the services they deliver while they are studying. Society will see the number of young people in a NEET situation decrease and people in need will feel more included. Supporting businesses will themselves contribute to empower their future customers or employees. Furthermore, vocational schools will bring innovation by offering a new method of teaching vocational subjects which will encourage and motivate both its students and teachers; engaged in new, modern and effective learning processes.”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner column_margin=”default” text_align=”left”][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”6859″ bio_image_url=”6859″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”Shaping the Future with Entrepreneurship Education ” team_member_bio=”We live in a time of an explosion of knowledge and new technologies where every skill that we teach in schools becomes obsolete after a few years due to growing technological advances. Today, more than half of the 12 million long-term unemployed do not have sufficient qualification or skills needed to succeed on the labour market. So where does the problem reside in? The answer is quite evident. The bottleneck in the supply of skilled workforce certainly occurs mainly due to the current inappropriate education policy framework. In practice it means that schools are not capable to provide young people with skills desired by employers since with the current pace of technology advancement, it takes time until educators master their use and introduce them into syllabuses.
A changing world creates many new jobs and the challenges that the near future presents can be transformed into opportunities and drivers of growth. New jobs, however, can only arise when there are enough skilled people capable of adapting to a rapidly changing environment. We already have the tools we need to do this, but we lack the mind-set – the way we look at education. Education, everywhere in the world, got stuck in schools with a ‘learn first, act in the world later” attitude. This logic must be changed. Today’s kids live in a completely different context, hence the need for a different education. Our kids now need an education that is far more connected and real than in the past. For this reason we need to ensure, that current education and skills are always linked to the labour market. Just as we cannot speak about employment without education, we cannot contemplate education without the employment perspective.
I believe education is a collective responsibility, we have to take a hard look at what all of us should be doing differently. For me the answer is promoting entrepreneurship education. The focus on fostering entrepreneurship in some Member States in Europe is much needed. Of course we do not need to make everyone in Europe an entrepreneur but we need to boost an entrepreneurial spirit in today’s youth. Everyone can learn being entrepreneurial and benefit from it, because even the most successful entrepreneurs were not born, they were built. We must therefore prepare and equip a new generation of innovators and problem-solvers in every sector, be it a doctor or a civil servant. Entrepreneurial competences are more valuable than ever to any business or organization or administration and are a key factor in young people making a successful transition from school to work.
I am happy that in recent years there has been increased attention given to the need of entrepreneurship education at the European level. I, personally, put particular focus on entrepreneurship education in my report on ‘Matching skills and jobs’ and the new report on ‘New Skills Agenda for Europe’ that is currently being negotiated in the Parliament. In the report I explicitly call for entrepreneurship education to be part of the curriculum in the Member States in order to develop an individual entrepreneurial mind-set in citizens. However, time is running fast, and to get visible results on the labor market, we must act immediately. We must deviate from the backward “extinguishing of fires” practice and better anticipate labour market needs. In order to do so, involvement of the triangle – academia, businesses and policymakers is needed.
For this reason, I very much welcome the activities of the European Entrepreneurship NETwork (EE-HUB) and the new campaign ‘Switch on Europe!’ that I am proudly part of.
The campaign aims to raise awareness about the lack of entrepreneurship education in European education systems and the missed opportunity for European citizens and its economy. I believe that entrepreneurship education is not only an opportunity, but nowadays rather a duty for Europe if it wants to keep its leadership position. Businesses are already struggling to find entrepreneurial employees and to tackle the widening disparity between staffing needs and qualified applicants. Data shows about 40% companies have difficulties finding staff with the right skills. Moreover, experts suggest that this skills gap could impact economic and corporate growth for the next 15 years! So what are we waiting for? Let’s set a new education framework that better fits to the kids of tomorrow and help them thrive! Let’s ‘Switch on Europe!’” job_position=”by MEP Martina Dlabajová”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”6965″ bio_image_url=”6965″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”Entrepreneurship Education should be practical and playful” job_position=”By MEP Kaja Kallas” team_member_bio=”I am supporting entrepreneurship education in Europe and Estonia as I believe starting with your own idea and working for oneself is the way forward. Internet has provided us with endless possibilities to develop ideas that would find few customers on a local level, but reach millions on a global scale. Young people are very creative these days and they see the world differently. We should help them to find the right tools to start with.
I believe that entrepreneurial education should be very practical. Real entrepreneurs should talk about their experiences – their successes, but more importantly about their failures. Young people need to see that it is OK to fail, you don’t have to succeed the first time you take something up. When you fail, you learn. Skype was created in Estonia and it was the 10th project of the same people. 9 previous projects had failed, but only the lessons from these failures helped them to come up with Skype that has enjoyed global success.
I also think that entrepreneurial education for young people has to be playful. In Tartu, Estonia there’s Ettevõtluskool, where young people are divided into groups and have to play the whole chain from forming ideas to selling the product. Each are given starting capital and in the end it is assessed who managed to grow capital and who lost. Government, bank, advertising agency, factory and other elements are all part of the process, so that young people actually have to play through all the steps of doing business including obtaining licenses, getting loans and paying taxes. In the end they can discuss what the hardest part was, share their biggest surprises and analyse what would they do differently next time. Playing it all through creates huge interest in building a business in real life and helps to avoid the mistakes they made during their studies.
Studies show that people who have established student companies during their studies are more likely later to start their own company. Considering that more and more young people don’t want to work for others, it is important that we give them the right toolset to develop their ideas. Some of them might come up with something that could make our lives easier.”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”7362″ bio_image_url=”7362″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”How to suceed in Business: Young entrepreneurs speak out” team_member_bio=”Speaking in Brussels recently, six young European entrepreneurs credited their success to key attributes. They also had advice for policymakers.
The entrepreneurs were participating in an event organised by JA Europe and Ferd, the leading Norway-based investor with a specialist interest in fostering the social economy. The six, all alumni of JA programmes, were the first to join Ferd’s List, an annual award for inspirational entrepreneurship and leaders. The event concluded with a round table for stakeholders.
Norway’s ambassador to the EU, Oda Helen Slatnes, introduced the celebration by saying that “Europe needs young inspirational entrepreneurs `{`and`}` these are the champions.” They were leaders not only because they were successful in business but also through their “true commitment to broader society.”
This was a theme picked up by Johan Andresen, chairman of Ferd and sponsor of Ferd’s List. The jury had been impressed by the “lasting values and clear footprints” of the six honourees, he said. He went on to explain that entrepreneurship is about developing a mind-set whose characteristics included initiative, curiosity, and willingness to give back to society. Important though these are in business, they matter for other occupations, too. “Entrepreneurship is too important for entrepreneurs alone.” He suggested that honourees on a future Ferd’s List ought to represent a more diverse occupational group. They should include doctors and perhaps even ambassadors.
So to which key attributes did the six honourees owe their success? You might expect them to identify commitment and perseverance amongst their ‘must-haves’ and they did. There were less obvious attributes as well. Six stood out.
One of these was team work. Surprisingly entrepreneurs are not at their best on their own. “Surround yourself with good people,” said Christian Erfurt, Danish co-founder of Be My Eyes, an app enabling the visually impaired to ‘see’ through the eyes of sighted volunteers. In particular, he counselled, “find a couple of good people and stick with them.”
A second attribute was desire to look beyond their immediate surroundings. “Travel,” urged David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar, a new powerful way to reveal true website user behaviour and experiences with one central tool. Think big, he said; go global quickly. Natural advice from a Maltese like David perhaps but practising what he preaches has seen Hotjar grow into a company that in May reported annually recurring revenues of $8m – and its only three years since he founded it.
Third attribute: understand your market. Claudia Suhov, who provides education programmes in Romania through her company Kidster, encouraged would-be entrepreneurs to give priority to marketing. You need to know what you are trying to sell; that’s a given. But you need also to know how to sell it. For her marketing is an indispensable skill for an entrepreneur. And you must be a lifelong learner. “It’s been seven years since founding Kidster and I’m learning new things every day,” she revealed.
Next: humility. But surely humility and entrepreneurship cannot go together? They must, suggested Chris Slater, founder of Simply Business, now one of the UK’s largest online business insurance providers. “Be humble and celebrate the success of others,” he recommended, and make sure that you learn from it. He also stressed the importance of “doing it in the right way.” Companies must serve society as a whole as well as their shareholders and employees.
Number five: be willing to dump traditional business models. Erik Fjellborg, Swedish founder of Quinyx, offering the first fully cloud-based workforce management solutions, said that today’s entrepreneurs needed to embrace new ways of employing their team members. Short-term contracts in the so-called gig economy offered exciting opportunities for employee and employer alike.
But in the end “just do it,” said Boris Kolev, serial entrepreneur and founder of DigiMark Ventures, a Sofia-headquartered mobile applications company. “Be out there and do stuff,” agreed David Darmanin. Have the courage to try. Do not be discouraged by failure. Learn from it and try again.
The six honourees had advice for policymakers as well. They should stop giving free money to business, said Boris Kolev. In his opinion “Europe ruins competitivity with grants.” For David Darmanin policymakers “need to make things simple.” They should work to reduce friction in the system. Start-ups should be allowed to be disruptive. Lower taxes and less paperwork would help start-ups, thought Claudia Suhov, whilst Chris Slater returned to the learning theme with his view that public authorities should encourage mentoring programmes and support networks for fledgling entrepreneurs.
Responding for the European Commission, DG GROW’s head of unit for entrepreneurship, Ulla Engelmann, said that policymakers aimed to be facilitators by creating opportunities for learning and best practice exchange and by encouraging the member states to remove barriers to entrepreneurship. Policymakers at national and European level had to create what she called a supportive eco-system for entrepreneurs.
Innovation Norway aims to do just that. Pål Næss, Director of Entrepreneurs and Start-ups and member of the Ferd’s List jury, described some of the services available from his organisation. They help entrepreneurs from the very beginning (by testing the first ideas in likeminded networks) through development (offering mentoring and specialist advice) to market entry (for example, with market analysis and start-up grants) and support for global ambitions with advice about international competitivity. In his view one of the main tasks for public policy in this area is working alongside entrepreneurs to remove barriers for global success and providing mentoring and support services at the early start-up phase.
Eva Maydell, Bulgarian MEP and JA ambassador, urged policymakers to acquire real practical experience in the field. Chris Slater, founder of leading UK online business insurance provider, strongly agreed. He suggested that officials must work closely with the private sector. Mrs Maydell also drew attention to different opinions amongst her colleagues in the parliament. For example, some were highly critical of Google and Facebook whilst others regretted the absence of European equivalents. There was no consensus yet.
Agreement was widespread, however, on the need for entrepreneurial education. It should start at primary schools, thought Irene Cervellera Micheli, CEO of We Are Family Foundation. Acquiring basic digital skills was indispensable. For Boris Kolev it was important to teach in the right way. Learning by doing not remembering by reading was key to developing an entrepreneurial mind set. We needed to empower and support teachers, argued Eva Maydell. Too many feel unprepared to teach entrepreneurship. She added that one in six employers report that they cannot find the right applicants for the vacancies they have. We can fill this gap by widening the availability of entrepreneurship education courses.
Caroline Jenner, CEO of JA Europe, agreed that this was urgently needed. Concluding the event, she pointed out that less than 20% of young Europeans had access to school programmes of entrepreneurial education. This had to change.”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”7485″ bio_image_url=”7485″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” job_position=”By Iolanda Giovidelli, Headmaster, I.I.S. LICEALE “Quinto Orazio Flacco” Portici” name=”Knowledge is the greatest competitive advantage for a sustainable growth ” team_member_bio=”As headmaster of the Italian high school Q.O. Flacco, I do recognise the importance of incenting more entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours among the students. We would not be playing our role as educators if we had created a school completely disconnected from the present dynamics of the job market which tends to change much faster than any syllabus or policy making in education. This is due to the historical context in which we live in where new social and economic patterns have been forcefully created by the global competition. It’s a cultural matter that should be widely and structurally dealt with starting from the re-thinking of an Education pattern, more pervasively focused on the acquisition of soft skills, a flexible modus operandi and an entrepreneurial mindset. Of course we claim the centrality of knowledge and the epistemic cores of the various disciplines. We cannot let the primacy of knowledge in Education fall apart or be weakened in any way. Indeed, we believe that knowledge is the greatest competitive advantage for a sustainable growth and we advocate the highest levels of accomplishments at the higher education level.
I think that this is one of the critical points of the whole debate about EE: a major risk of misunderstanding, as far as entrepreneurial literacy is concerned, resides in a widespread perception of EE as a surrogate of a wider and more traditional concept of transmission of knowledge and also culturesthe National Education systems for which they are in charge of.
The only way to overcome the problem is to promote the EE as a complementary thus necessary form of literacy as well as the digital or civic literacies; all assimilated with the disciplines by the means of a student-centered and projectwork-based teaching approach.
Whatever professional careers our students will pursue, the entire school community is compelled to train them for to have successful careerswhich will allow them not to be merely doctors, lawyers or even entrepreuneurs but rather to become skillful and expert professionals. This challenging mission implies that we need to equip them with transferable competences such as problem-solving skills, team-working abilities, communicative and organisational skills, as well as eliciting their creative and innovative attitudes.
Far from being an “automatic switch,” the embedding of entrepreunerial education into the school curricola requires time, work and resources. Moreover, it encompasses different social stakeholders and their ability to network.
For this purpose, our school have been working on having the Entrepreunership Education programmes intergrated into its curricula for the past four years. We have signed protocol agreements and partnerships with different local stakeholders in education such as: Universities, Junior Achievement Italy, private companies and associations of businesses and professionals.
Furthermore, we have designed, implemented and disseminated the School format as like a three-year based Enterprise Programme which has already involved lots of students. As a result of such a commitment, significant goals have been accomplished: our students won the regional competitions within the JA Italy programme of mini-company creation, in 2015 and 2016 and last April, one of our school enterprises was awarded the prestigious italian Prize “Italiadecide” by the Minister of Education in the presence of the Italian Head of State, the Ministers of Economic Development, Public Administration and other important institutional representatives.
We are continuing on this path and we never stop projecting, networking and involving as many social players as possible to help achieve the common goal of effective job matching, job creation and self-employment attitudes.
We know that only a few of these opportunities are available within the confines of a classroom alone but through inventive projects, the seed of entrepreneurial behavior can be sown.”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner column_margin=”default” text_align=”left”][vc_column_inner enable_animation=”true” animation=”grow-in” column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”7659″ bio_image_url=”7659″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”Lobachevsky Lyceum : Russian entrepreneurial school of the year 2017″ team_member_bio=”It has been always interesting to study at our Lyceum. Thanks to JA it was even more interesting and useful. I was at the 10th grade when I realized that I want to connect my professional life with economics and entrepreneurship. The big question was: how I can achieve my goal? I found the answer through participation in JA Company Program. Back in 2014 this program gave my classmates and me a chance to start and run a student company Education 2.0, to learn the basics of business and gain more skills, experience and confidence. It was an excellent opportunity to learn by doing and meet other young entrepreneurs from across and Russia and across Europe. The very first Education 2.0 was successful, and we, founders, are very proud that our company’s name has become Lobachevsky Lyceum’s brand, and new generations of students year after year come up with new ideas of Education 2.0. After graduating Lyceum I started studying Business Informatics at Kazan Federal University. I continue striving to fulfill my goal to become an entrepreneur and I continue being part of JA working with JA regional centre in Kazan where I help students organize their own student companies. JA gave me a lot: knowledge, skills, and great friends and, above all, confidence and experience that help find your calling and achieve your dreams.
Ekaterina Sedova, graduate of Lobachevsky Lyceum and JA Alumni, Project Manager at JA Russia Regional Centre in Tatarstan
Participation in JA Company Program is an important part of our team’s daily life at Lobachevsky Lyceum. Running a student company is a great way to express yourself, to expand understanding of how you can use your interests and knowledge to turn them into something interesting, real and important and effectively prepare for the future career. My dream is to open my own business in the near future. I do my best to make my dream come true: I read a lot, attend trainings, but, of course, participation in JA Company Program gives me much more, because it is a real experience of business, relationships, responsibility and achievements. Thank you, JA for this excellent program and the valuable knowledge we receive and learn to apply.
Alina Miftakhova, President of the student company “Leader 2.0“ at Lobachevsky Lyceum
Lobachevsky Lyceum is a structural subdivision of the Kazan Federal University, and is also included in the TOP-200 best educational institutions of Russia. JA entrepreneurship education model has been implemented in the Lyceum since its opening in 2013. We try to participate in all many JA Russia’s programs and events as possible. Many students have joined JA Company Program and our Education 2.0 project has become our brand recognized through winning republican contests, festivals in Tatarstan and All-Russia JA competitions. Members of the Company Education 2.0 in 2017 received an award granted by the Council of Children’s Organizations of the Republic of Tatarstan in support of development of talented youth. We are grateful to JA for helping us expand the horizons and unleash the potential of our students through development of entrepreneurial skills, ingenuity and responsiveness, better understanding of social responsibility, aspiration for growth and self-improvement.
Galina Boglachevskaya, Head teacher of Lobachevsky Lyceum
” job_position=”Testimonies from students & teacher”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][team_member image_url=”7691″ bio_image_url=”7691″ team_memeber_style=”bio_fullscreen” name=”Europe needs entrepreneurial people that generate creative ideas and turn them into action” team_member_bio=”Having an entrepreneurial mindset is becoming even more important as digitalisation increasingly impacts the world of work.
Entrepreneurship education can equip young Europeans with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that open doors to individual fulfilment and career opportunities in times of uncertainty and rapid change.
The skills that make us uniquely ‘human’ – our ability to work with others, to be creative, and to persevere – will never become obsolete. In fact, they will become more essential for an innovative and inclusive society in the future. We need to have a real dialogue on these skills and I believe that an entrepreneurial mindset is key.
We are working proactively with Member States and stakeholders, including JA Europe, to support the development of those skills across Europe. For instance, the Commission has developed the Entrepreneurship Competence Framework, which serves as a reference for any initiative aiming to foster entrepreneurial capacity, including the design of curricula and leaning activities and the assessment of individuals’ entrepreneurial competencies. JA Europe is among many stakeholders that have helped to build a dynamic and enthusiastic community around this framework.
The work of JA Europe and the successes of JA alumni is testimony to the value and potential of entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. I see it as an excellent example of co-operation between employers, learning providers, and young people leading to impact across the EU. The invaluable experiences of students who do an entrepreneurship course, and especially those who experience hand-on practical activities, form the firm foundations for a more entrepreneurial Europe. We must ensure that the potential of these experiences are built upon and that entrepreneurial skills are recognised and developed in all education and training sectors as well as within the working age population. Entrepreneurship is no doubt one of the key competences for lifelong learning.” job_position=”Marianne Thyssen, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/4″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_row_inner column_margin=”default” text_align=”left”][vc_column_inner column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ width=”1/1″ column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1492380834786{margin-top: 0px !important;margin-right: 0px !important;margin-bottom: 0px !important;margin-left: 0px !important;border-top-width: 0px !important;border-right-width: 0px !important;border-bottom-width: 0px !important;border-left-width: 0px !important;padding-top: 0px !important;padding-right: 0px !important;padding-bottom: 0px !important;padding-left: 0px !important;}”]
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