European arts and humanities students (A&H) face challenges with accessing graduate level employment and entrepreneurship opportunities. These courses typically do not have a direct route to the job market, reflected in higher unemployment and lower salaries. There can be a lack of knowledge from academics about aligning subject expertise with wider industry need as well as a lack of recognition by businesses of the wider benefits and skill sets of A&H graduates.
Dedicated support in HEIs for entrepreneurial activity has been mainly focused on business, economics and ICT faculties (UBI). A&H Students come from a very different starting point, with education and skills that do not meet industry need in an obvious way. Therefore, a fresh approach is needed to develop a tailored A&H entrepreneurship model that improves the long-term entrepreneurial prospects for A&H students.
The AHEH alliance will:
– Bring together 14 partners from across 7 EU member states to improve the entrepreneurial capacity of A&H students
– Jointly research, design, test and disseminate an innovative programme of entrepreneurial training for A&H staff/ students aligned with the EntreComp Competence Framework. This builds upon partners’ prior experience of EU-funded enterprise projects
– Have HEIs, businesses and stakeholders working together to champion the value of A&H students to a wider audience and ensure that industry need is reflected in the training programmes
– Create 7 new A&H Entrepreneurship Hubs situated in partner faculties. These will be the specialist conduits for permanently improving the entrepreneurial skill-sets of A&H staff and students as well as a template for wider exploitation
– Create a website that will complement the 7 Hubs as an ongoing resource-base for disseminating/exploiting outputs
Soon we will publish an exclusive interview with Paolo Montemurro from Materahub , new NICE Network member , who describes the progress and the ideas developing this Project