AT A POLICY LEVEL

• If you’re aiming to influence young people’s career choices, try targeting students in their last year of education who are about to enter the labour market.
• If you’re aiming to spur the creation of businesses that go beyond subsistence level, try focusing on developing skills that, according to scientific evidence, correlate the most with transformative entrepreneurship – like confidence, ambition or self-efficacy.
• If you’re dealing with primary and lower secondary school children, try prioritising soft skills for entrepreneurship over business knowledge and hard skills.
• If you’re dealing with highly educated individuals, try prioritising skills like resource seeking and networking, as lack of knowledge might not be the main barrier.

ON A PROGRAMME

• Try including real-life entrepreneurs to provide testimonies and act as mentors or advisors in your programme.
• If you’re hoping for an easily scalable intervention, consider using non-interactive formats such as recorded interviews with real-life entrepreneurs to expose participants to role models.
• If you’re willing to use non-traditional and non-interactive educational activities, like edutainment or testimonial videos, try complementing these with formal in-class training to discuss the content presented and consolidate business concepts.
• If you’re aiming to build business knowledge and hard skills, try combining theoretical training with well-defined practical activities such as defining a business plan or pitching ideas.

DURING DELIVERY

• When selecting role models, try choosing individuals from groups that are underrepresented in entrepreneurship.
• Try pairing participants with role models of the same gender.
• If you’re willing to increase team diversity in your course, try forming larger teams so as not to compromise the benefits of having teammates that participants can easily relate to.
• Try sharing the potential benefits of deviating from fully homogeneous teams with the participants to encourage students to form more diverse teams voluntarily.

AT A POLICY LEVEL

• Avoid using entrepreneurship education to make participants more employable. The evidence suggests that wage-employment is either unaffected or reduced by it.
• Avoid nudging youths to rush into starting their own businesses before they have the resources and skills needed to succeed. Failed premature attempts can hinder positive attitudes and intentions towards self-employment.
• Avoid investing significant resources into teacher training without changing the incentives for teachers and their students in terms of how they’re evaluated.

ON A PROGRAMME

• Avoid using role models if the main objective of your programme is to build the participants’ entrepreneurial skills and business knowledge.
• Avoid using low-intensity exposure to role-model interventions with individuals that are heavily exposed to entrepreneurship through other sources such as their parents.

DURING DELIVERY

• Avoid presenting a distorted image of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Such images can lead to unrealistic beliefs and expectations about actual barriers to self-employment.
• If you’re selecting role models for school-aged students, avoid including successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of school, as this might reduce the effort they put into their own education.
• Avoid creating extremely diverse teams in your course. The costs of building effective communication within the team can outweigh the benefits of gathering a wider variety of skills.