Improving students’ Entreprenneurial skills – a cross-border experience

Abstract

As more and more graduates are entering the workplace, creating sufficient employment opportunities for them has become a pressing problem in most countries. Consequently, most governments wish that more of these fresh graduates will set up their own business instead of depending on the government to provide them with a career. For example, in Malaysia, entrepreneurship is made a required course for all academic disciplines so as to equip graduates with basic entrepreneurial skills. However, many of these programmes do not provide enough hands-on opportunity for the students to use the business knowledge acquired. A cross-border collaborative project by a Malaysian university in northern Malaysia and a Thai university in Southern Thailand was implemented to complement the efforts that have been taken to prepare the students to venture into business. The collaborative project required the participants to prepare a business plan that is almost good enough for use in the application for business loan on an innovative product. The preparation of the business plan requires the students to apply the business knowledge gained. Besides, the project also helps the participants to enhance their soft skills, English language proficiency and cross-cultural understanding. This paper will briefly describe the design and the implementation of the project and present the findings obtained using questionnaire survey and interview conducted on the project impact on the development of participants’ entrepreneurial skills