Exchange and mobility Exchange and mobility

Entrepreneurship Summit in vocational education and training

Entrepreneurial thinking and action are becoming increasingly important in VET programmes. A stay abroad for young professionals is the ideal opportunity to develop these skills. In addition, cooperation between Swiss and foreign institutions provides important impulses for the development of programmes in the field of entrepreneurship education. The Entrepreneurship Summit brought together actors from Switzerland and Europe to promote exchange and encourage new partnerships.

Openness, initiative and creativity are indispensable for young people who want to help shape tomorrow's society and working world. For the education system, this means promoting the development of corresponding competences and enabling learning experiences. This mission connects the pilot project “Entrepreneurial Thinking and Acting at Swiss Vocational Schools" (ETA) and Movetia's support programmes for exchange and mobility. The Entrepreneurship Summit on 2 June 2022 brought together VET stakeholders from both fields of action.

Entrepreneurial and transversal competences for vocational education and training

The Entrepreneurship Summit focused on entrepreneurship education and provided participants with (inter)national networking opportunities on this topic. The diverse inputs and workshops provided insight into existing approaches in this regard:

ETA is committed to ensuring that all vocational learners have the opportunity to acquire entrepreneurial skills. The myidea.ch learning programme developed for this purpose is currently being piloted in various cantons. Two videos provide an insight into the experiences in the cantons of Solothurn and Valais.
Movetia enables VET learners to work in another language or cultural region and thus provides a unique opportunity to develop key transversal competences - in the spirit of entrepreneurial thinking and action. The testimonials of VET learners and graduates from the French-speaking part of Switzerland bear witness to this.
The Austrian Initiative for Teaching Entrepreneurship (IFTE) promotes the entrepreneurship attitude of young people with various events - such as the Youth Start European Entrepreneurship Award.
The Gebert Rüf Foundation supports projects that promote entrepreneurship education. Examples are: TechPreneurs (vocational learners discover technology and entrepreneurship in personal exchange with tech start-up founders), Unternehmer Campus - YoungPreneur (teaching transversal entrepreneurial skills in vocational education) and Unternehmerhaus libs (entrepreneurship courses for vocational learners).
The Finnish Jyväskylä Educational Consortium Gradia offers its vocational learners an entrepreneurship learning programme that is considered best practice in Europe.
Worldwide, there is a long-standing expertise in working with entrepreneurship education. It is therefore worthwhile for Swiss educational institutions to cooperate across national borders in order to benefit from this expertise. Movetia supports Swiss educational institutions financially in this European and international cooperation. SUPSI, for example, has benefited from international know-how in the European Tyc(o)nstructor project. Together with expert organisations from Europe, the Swiss university developed a serious game to promote entrepreneurial skills among bricklayers, which is now being used in basic vocational education in Switzerland.

The presentations in the right-hand column provide further details on the initiatives and offers mentioned.

The event was organised by the SDK, the BBZ Olten, the Olten Region Economic Development Agency and Movetia!

Would you also like to benefit from the impetus of international cooperation? Movetia supports cooperation between educational institutions, within Europe within the framework of an Erasmus+ project, but also worldwide.