Recently, we have seen an increase in youth unemployment, reports of declining number of graduate opportunities, and large number of applicants applying to the same roles, standing at 140 applicants per vacancy. At the same time, good news is that degrees remain very valuable when it comes to employability. Additionally, skills that students and graduates have matter!  

In others and more recently, in a report by the National Foundation for Education Research, the range of transferable skills were identified as important for employability, such as communication skills, collaboration, information literacy, organising, planning and prioritising, problem solving and decision making, and creative thinking. In his EEUK blog, Bolton discusses the differences between enterprise and employability skills, and how they are interlinked, noting the importance of both when it comes to career prospects of students and graduates.  

Enterprise and entrepreneurship education have an important role to play when it comes to the wider challenges. A diagram below from the report by Edwards and Jordan (2024) neatly summarises the breadth of contributions of enterprise and entrepreneurship education.  

Research has recognised that enterprise and entrepreneurship education – expectedly – has an important influence on skills, knowledge and attitudes towards venture creation, graduate business startups and overall job creation (Carpenter and Wilson, 2022; Cui and Bell, 2022; Maragh, 2024). However, enterprise and entrepreneurship education can lead to entrepreneurial skills development and an increase in social capital and self-efficacy (Maragh, 2024). Importantly, entrepreneurial competencies can support employability and help people succeed in various career pathways.  

At the beginning of this month, I attended the International Enterprise Educators Conference held at Nottingham Trent University, and it was fantastic to see so many different and innovative examples of the activities that are aimed at developing entrepreneurial skills of students – but that are not necessarily aimed at venture creation – happening in classrooms in the curricular and extra-curricular spaces. Some of the examples were employment opportunities within startups. Rebmann and Stephen (2021) note the importance of offering work opportunities in small companies due to the interesting and challenging nature of work. Some were activities designed for skills development – workshops, hackathons, interactive self-paced activities – and empowering students to undertake their own skills development journey.  

While the impact of these can be difficult to track and measure directly at times, all those activities remain immensely important, and are likely to be even more important in the context of challenges outlined at the beginning.