13 September 2023 – The partners of the PoMP project, which is supported by the Norway Grants, have launched activation of young people. In a pilot start-up event, young people strengthened some key competences for lifelong learning by developing entrepreneurial ideas. One of these is the entrepreneurial competence, which is becoming one of the core competences for lifelong learning in the forthcoming overhaul of the curricula in Slovenian primary and secondary education.
On Wednesday, 6 September 2023, the project partners, together with teachers/mentors and students from the School of Economics, Tourism and Agriculture Ptuj (ŠETK), carried out a start-up challenge. Together with students they searched for ideas and developed them into entrepreneurial ideas. The students will present or pitch their business idea in front of an audience and a jury. The best ones will go on to the Pitch Festival, which will take place in 2024.
The activation of students in the PoMP project will significantly contribute to the training of teachers because teachers will achieve deep learning of entrepreneurship competence through experiential learning, enabling them to work independently even after the project concludes. Furthermore, activation is even more critical for young people themselves because, through experiential learning within project entrepreneurial events, they will strengthen their entrepreneurship competence, improve their attitude toward entrepreneurship, enhance their entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and increase their entrepreneurial intentions.
PoMP Academy for primary and secondary school teachers/mentors
The purpose of the PoMP Academy, a new service in the Slovenia, is to equip teachers/mentors for advisory and mentoring roles with young individuals in the field of entrepreneurship and enterprise. The PoMP programme comprises a set of practical tools and contemporary methodologies for teaching entrepreneurship and enterprise to young people, with concurrent use of the PoMP interactive handbook. One of the innovations of this training was the introduction of pre-training in an online classroom. Project partners of PoMP developed content-rich materials on entrepreneurship, divided into 8 modules, covering the full spectrum of knowledge required for effective teaching of entrepreneurial subjects in schools.
Within the project, each of the 5 Slovenian project partners will conduct a PoMP Academy. For instance, in August, the PoMP Academy, organized by the Development Center Novo Mesto, was attended by 21 teachers from 10 primary and 3 secondary schools from Novo Mesto and the surrounding area. The online training was complemented by hands-on practical sessions at the Podbreznik Entrepreneurship Incubator. There, teachers engaged in exercises and workshops to deepen their understanding of business model elements, with a particular emphasis on the importance of empathy in the development of business ideas.
More about the PoMP project
The project “Supporting Youth in Entrepreneurship – PoMP” is carried out by five Slovenian partners (ZRS Bistra Ptuj, Primorski Technological Park, Development Center Novo Mesto, Technological Park Ljubljana, and Saša Incubator) and the Norwegian partner, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Its purpose is to establish a comprehensive and sustainable supportive environment that encourages Slovenian primary and secondary school students to search for entrepreneurial ideas, develop business models, and provides them with the necessary entrepreneurial knowledge to enhance their entrepreneurial competence. We have created the PoMP Academy to assist teachers and a nationwide network of supporting institutions.
The project aims to achieve two primary objectives: (1) enhancing the entrepreneurial competencies of teachers/mentors to improve their professional and pedagogical skills in teaching entrepreneurship, and (2) increasing entrepreneurial competencies among young individuals, thereby strengthening their prospects for employment or self-employment.
The main target groups are: (1) students, (2) their teachers/mentors, (3) principals, (4) project partner staff who will improve their entrepreneurial competence during the project, (5) support and educational institutions, and (6) interested individuals who will join the supportive network with the aim of providing long-term support to young people, especially in less dynamic environments.
Source: the PoMP project and Novo mesto Development Centre