Submitted manuscript, 1.24 MB, PDF document
Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN › Conference paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to conference - Without ISBN/ISSN › Conference paper › peer-review
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TY - CONF
T1 - Mind the skills gap
T2 - International Conference for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Regional Development
AU - Downs, Carolyn
PY - 2015/6/18
Y1 - 2015/6/18
N2 - The Eliemental project is an EU-funded partnership across four countries and eight partners working to understand the impact of socio-cultural barriers on entrepreneurship amongst socially marginalised groups. The European Commission notes ‘Certain groups in society such as people from ethnic minorities face additional difficulties in trying to set up businesses’ and highlights the need for solutions to barriers to entrepreneurship (http://ow.ly/8Obz8).This paper will explore types of enterprise education required to help people overcome socio-cultural barriers and move towards self-employment. Working with diverse communities including Roma, recovering substance abusers, people experiencing mental and physical ill health, disabilities, long-term unemployed youth and migrants we identified a soft-skills gap and a range of impacts caused by shortfalls in soft skills that act as invisible barriers to enterprise. Our project has also taken an innovative participatory action approach to working in the communities where our target groups live, and have identified community access points which will become a focus for the delivery of mentoring and enterprise-readiness education and training. The paper will conclude with an evaluation of the potential for Eliemental to be adopted as a first-stage enterprise education intervention in a variety of settings.
AB - The Eliemental project is an EU-funded partnership across four countries and eight partners working to understand the impact of socio-cultural barriers on entrepreneurship amongst socially marginalised groups. The European Commission notes ‘Certain groups in society such as people from ethnic minorities face additional difficulties in trying to set up businesses’ and highlights the need for solutions to barriers to entrepreneurship (http://ow.ly/8Obz8).This paper will explore types of enterprise education required to help people overcome socio-cultural barriers and move towards self-employment. Working with diverse communities including Roma, recovering substance abusers, people experiencing mental and physical ill health, disabilities, long-term unemployed youth and migrants we identified a soft-skills gap and a range of impacts caused by shortfalls in soft skills that act as invisible barriers to enterprise. Our project has also taken an innovative participatory action approach to working in the communities where our target groups live, and have identified community access points which will become a focus for the delivery of mentoring and enterprise-readiness education and training. The paper will conclude with an evaluation of the potential for Eliemental to be adopted as a first-stage enterprise education intervention in a variety of settings.
KW - Enterprise
KW - Soft skills
KW - Marginalised social groups
KW - Education
M3 - Conference paper
Y2 - 18 June 2015 through 19 July 2015
ER -