The project’s main objectives were to increase both the quality and quantity of the Entrepreneurship Education that already was in progress and to pursue the strategic goal of internationalisation more intensively. In order to foster the entrepreneurial mindset and skills of students in the best possible way, teaching staff need to have the relevant personal and social skills, as well as the methods and tools at their disposal. They were, therefore, expected to enhance their linguistic, social and intercultural skills through international exchange and attendance of training courses. Another goal was for them to acquire tools that would enable them to ‘live’ entrepreneurship in their classes. The objectives of the job-shadowing placements were to observe and reflect on the implementation of EE in best practice schools. The aim of the structured training courses was to develop personal, linguistic as well as methodological and didactic skills, the latter focusing on new digital tools and project-based learning, project management and development of entrepreneurial skills. In compliance with the goal of internationalisation and the principle of employability, we also wanted to increase the frequency of CLIL-units in our teaching.
In line with the guiding principle of all colleges of social and service industries, imparting foreign language and intercultural skills to our students is a priority for us, as are the key goals of our curriculum ‘employability, active citizenship and entrepreneurship’. They determine both the content and the design of the courses taught at our school. Just as important, however, is their decisive impact on the strategic development of our institution. This means that we aim to prepare our students for a variety of occupations in an international setting. Therefore, we have been encouraging them, with the support of Erasmus+, to do their mandatory internships in other European countries. Yet, we work towards these goals largely in school, where the teaching principle of Entrepreneurship Education meanwhile plays an essential role, particularly since we were awarded the Entrepreneurship Education certificate as the first Styrian school of our type in 2019. It must be emphasized that this principle is not just understood in its narrow economic sense but rather as a much broader pedagogical mission to help our students develop an entrepreneurial mindset and personality, along with acquiring a set of relevant competences.