Assessment of the competencies supporting the entrepreneurial attitude of Finnish engineering students

In Finland, entrepreneurship education has been the focus of special attention in all the major Higher Education Institutes (HEI) for the past decade. In order for universities to be able to develop and adjust their courses and teaching methods to better support entrepreneurship education of university students, the current motivation and interest for entrepreneurship among students needs to be measured. The main objective of our research is to study do the first year engineering students already consider becoming an entrepreneur as a viable future option. In a survey conducted in 2017, students were asked to assess their own entrepreneurial competences, and ability to identify business opportunities in the markets. The development of the survey questionnaire was done on the basis of the description of entrepreneurship competence and empirically tested constructs of sub-competencies adopted to the context of entrepreneurship. We analyze and compare the self-assessment of students’ sub-competencies in groups with different attitudes towards entrepreneurship. Based on the differences in the level of sub-competencies in these groups and the correlation between sub-competencies we may assume, which sub-competencies may predict among students the intention to become an entrepreneur.