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Valorising and Nurturing Entrepreneurial Education across Europe. The Competences of Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs

After several months of hard work, the ECI consortium achieved another very important result contributing not only to the development of the project, but also, and most importantly, to the international mainstreaming and valorisation of the EntreComp Framework, the official model for the nurturing of entrepreneurial competences published and promoted by the European Commission.

The training content designed to operationalise the framework at EU level is finally available online and it is free for consultation. Such important achievement is the tip of a long process that engaged partners for more than one year.

At the end of last summer, the ECI Partnership finalised a detailed cross-reference analysis among the EntreComp Framework, ESCO (the classification of European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupation) and the EQF (European Qualifications Framework): a bond that the literature review – finalised during the development of the National Reports – proved to be highly consistent but still tangibly missing and not fully exploited.

The ultimate objective of this desk assessment was to establish an initial and operational connection between the EntreComp framework and the other two, allowing partners to operationalise a new model – the ECI model – for entrepreneurship valorisation and mainstreaming of entrepreneurial spirits across the VET dimension.

Each of the six competences selected by the partnership during the proposal as greater catalysts of “entrepreneurial attitudes”, has been reconducted to a specific dimension, field, and theoretical/operational setting of both ESCO and EQF, highlighting the different compliances by degree of consistency. We evaluated this degree by balancing each ESCO and EQF unit to the main and defining traits of each considered EntreComp competence as described by the same EU Joint Research Centre.

The results of this assessment can be found at the following link.

The development of the training modules kick-started during summer 2020; Partners invested energies, time, and efforts to comply with time schedule and quali/quantitative standards as discussed and foreseen during the proposal. The design of the modules in terms of content, structure, learning outcomes has been facilitated by a series of monthly brainstorming sessions in which partners had the opportunity to validate their ideas and have meaningful exchanges of views with their colleagues.

All training materials are EQF and ESCO compliant – a cross-referencing in which partners invested several months of close collaboration (please check the “Model” section for further references). The emerged results allowed partners to finalise a common methodology that provides for common understanding and shared guidelines upon all IO3-related activities.

The final Output consists in six training modules, each of which focusing on a specific EntreComp competence as highlighted by the framework. The material is organised as follows:

For a more comprehensive understanding of the subject, each training module is subdivided in further didactic units at the end of which there is a short self-assessment sheet. The training module comes with a short document (the so called “training fiche”) that summarises key concepts and main takeaways. Learners are recommended to an in-depth reading of both since they are highly complementary, rather than alternative.

In the Project, IHF asbl brings its expertise and experience as a key social player in international and European projects. In particular, IHF asbl ensures the “European Dimension” of the Project as it carries out all the technical tasks from a “European Perspective”, i.e. carrying out analysis of relevant EU policies and initiatives; extrapolating EU relevant case studies, lessons learned and best practices.

For further information on ECI EntreComp and other IHF asbl initiatives:

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