Julita Wasilczuk

The study investigates the entrepreneurial competencies and intentions of students. Their formation is a requirement of modern times. The question arises whether students of modern technical universities get entrepreneurial competencies and whether they transform these competencies into their entrepreneurial intentions. More than 3.6 thousand students from six technical universities from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania were surveyed. Methods of summarizing and grouping data, analysis of the structure of the population and distributions of its elements, evaluation of relationships were used to analyze the results of the survey. It was found that studying at technical universities is not an obstacle to the existence of entrepreneurial intentions among students. The respondents positively assessed their ability to recognize market opportunities for new business (the sum of the shares of positive answers exceeded the sum of the shares of negative answers by 12.4%). A positive generalized assessment was determined when assessing the ability to persuade others to invest in their business, while negative – their ability to write a formal business plan. It is proved that students who highly value their entrepreneurial abilities are much more likely to show the intention to start their own business (р < 0.001). Students’ focus on starting their own business is partly explained by the fact that they connect employment in corporations with a low guarantee of job retention. High positive integrated assessments received the following advantages of own entrepreneurship: prestige (0.302), chance to be realized (0.362), and the ability to create jobs (0.597).

Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank Denislava Yordanova (Sofia University, Bulgaria), Tatjana Nikitina (Riga Technical University, Latvia), and Daiva Jurevičienė (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania) for helping to collect data at respective countries.

Current business conditions pose new challenges to youth entrepreneurship, which is a significant component of countries’ economic growth. In addition, Generation Z differs from previous generations and requires new approaches. In this context, a comprehensive study of the peculiarities and various aspects of youth entrepreneurship development is highly-demanded and relevant. Furthermore, the lower representation of women among entrepreneurs prompts the study to seek answers about the causes of this phenomenon.
This study aims to investigate the gender aspect of young people’s attitude (students who just started their university education) from Eastern and Central European countries to entrepreneurship. Notably, their entrepreneurial intentions, attitudes toward entrepreneurship, perceived threats of setting up the business, and determination to start/run a family business compared to working for a big corporation, from a gender perspective, are worth investigating. The study employed the survey with structured printed questionnaires spread in campuses among 3,636 first-year (bachelor) students of technical universities in Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria. The results show that male students are more determined to set up firms; however, the difference compared to the females is only 3.3%. No gender differences were observed in the vision of the attractiveness of running own business or in the perception of threats in running a business. Students of both genders do not suppose that working in a corporation is more attractive than a family business. Nevertheless, respondents of both genders gave the maximum score for the statement that corporations provide more excellent opportunities to develop competencies.