What is the profile of young entrepreneurs?
We have had statistics since 2010, making a program that is “Ideas with a future”. If we analyze the profile of young people who have participated in the program, the average age is 26.7 years, most of them have university studies (more than 65%). The work situation is curious, because we have that the 26% are working, 14% are self-employed, and 31% are unemployed; the rest continue studying. Nationality are: autochthonous (85%) and the rest, the other 15%, are distributed in a balanced way, between outside the EU and within the EU. Regarding the activity sector that they mainly startup, it is leisure, culture and tourism, followed closely by creative production.
What are the main barriers for young people to establish a business?
For what we have been able to verify in all this time, mainly is the lack of experience and knowledge in the sector in which they intend to startup. In many cases there is also a lack of financing, that the type of business that they really raise with the economic resources they have or can access is very complicated. I would also especially highlight the topic of networking, there is a lack of professional networking that allows them to develop their business or professional project.
How can young people access entrepreneurship?
I believe that we are currently experiencing a very positive change, for example, in all training cycles, in FP, there is a subject and therefore all the young people who participate in this training are already working on entrepreneurial skills. We, for example, participated from the moment of its creation with the FP “Emprèn foundation”and there is a call for prizes to present projects, and year after year, we are seeing how the level improves, there are more applications … I think there is a way It has to do with the formal training itself that is showing them this option and is also working on the concept of entrepreneurial skills. From the public side, we have spent many years with programs trying to understand that self-employment or the creation of a company is a job option. All of that, the truth is that in percentage terms they are very few, but I don’t know if that really has to change, because experience in the labor market is important: an excessively young person, if he or she has no experience, the possibility of throwing out a company for if alone it is very complicated; Having experience, expanding training is extremely important to the success of your possible initiatives.
How can the different sectors cooperate to make it possible?
Currently what we do is a very basic cooperation that is between all of us we spread what the others do, so every time there is a request to “we are doing a youth program, can you help us?” We spread, even in a very segmented way, because there really are few young people who undertake; In addition, we understand young people as those under 30 years of age, so there are not that many. I think that we should go and tend towards a cooperation in which we have shared programs, that is more difficult, but somehow to give a more comprehensive resource and accompany in a much more complete and effective way, I think that it would be optimal if we worked in the idea of designing joint projects, in which different entities intervened and each one of them contributed their expertise; I think that would be the most optimal way to collaborate. At the moment we are a little far from that, but everything Will come!
