Training for Academic Enterprise and Tangible Performance

Abstract

Universities in developing countries such as Bulgaria are increasingly expected to foster entrepreneurial skills among students through curricular training, yet evidence on whether such training changes those skills remains limited. Using the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp), we measured students’ self-assessed entrepreneurial skills across the 15 EntreComp competences before and after a 60-hour Business Economics course at the University of National and World Economy (UNWE), Sofia, in the 2022/2023 academic year. The pre-training group comprised 238 students and the post-training group 81 students. Because the questionnaire was anonymous, individual responses could not be linked across the two administrations, and the two groups are analyzed as independent samples rather than matched pairs. We compared the groups on all 15 skills using Mann-Whitney U tests with a Holm-Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. Post-training scores were higher on average in eight of the fifteen skills, but none of the differences remained significant after correction. These results are consistent with a positive association between the training and students’ self-assessed entrepreneurial skills, though the cross-sectional design does not support causal claims; a matched, individually linked pre/post design is needed to test this more directly.