SELF – Solo Entrepreneur Learning Framework project is based on the importance of SUPPORTING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS OF STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION, through the innovative concept of “SOLOPRENEURSHIP”. According to the European Commission and the rationale of the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework "EntreComp", in the changing society in which we currently live, it is essential that everyone has the ability to act on their ideas and the opportunities in their environment by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset. However, in recent years there have been major changes around entrepreneurship and ways of working. In particular, during and after the COVID-19 era, the rate of single-employee companies, known as "solopreneurship", has accelerated (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2021/2022 Global Report, GEM, 2022).
Considering solopreneurship as a highly valid pathway for HE students to transition from the world of education to the world of work, the SELF project will address the selected priorities as follows:
1- SUPPORTING INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS OF STUDENTS in HE by providing a training curricula around solo-entrepreneurship, enabling students to discover new self-employment pathways and improve their opportunities for upskilling and reskilling of (solo)entrepreneurial skills. The adequacy and pertinence of the training curricula will be determined by the mapping and identification of most sought-after and relevant competences for aspiring solo-entrepreneurs and self-employment, carried out by a consortium that combines HE institutions with companies, to consider a broad viewpoint.
2- STIMULATING INNOVATIVE LEARNING AND TEACHING PRACTICES by providing guidelines for practitioners and recommendations for policy makers. The “Manifesto of Solo-Entrepreneurship for Higher Education” will be elaborate as a white paper on the potential and challenges of solo-entrepreneurship for university graduate as means to transit from the world of education and world of work. This manifesto will be developed on the basis of conducting a comprehensive testing of the training on the targets to validate its usability and consistency in achieving the proposed learning objectives, drawing on the expertise of the HE institutions participating in the consortium. This result will allow to increase the scope of the project while disseminating an innovative learning method and teaching practices to exploit the results of the SELF project in other contexts.
3- ADDRESSING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN HE by considering e-learning training as a valid teaching method, easily accessible by users, flexible and with the capacity to achieve the learning outcomes, for which the project's open educational resources platform, "SELF Digital Warehouse", will be provided, containing the training and all the project's results and with the necessary functionalities to measure the performance of the results.
