14% of university students in the Canary Islands plan to start a business after graduation, an option that has tripled since the pandemic, before it was 5%, according to figures from the Observatory of the Entrepreneurial Spirit of University Students in the Canary Islands.
The GUESSS report, an acronym in English for the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Student's Survey, has been collecting information on the professional career option and entrepreneurial initiative of university students in the Canary Islands since 2013. The report was presented this Friday at the first Observatory of Entrepreneurship and SMEs of the Canary Islands (Oepyme), where this initiative is currently integrated.
According to GUESSS, the interest of university students in the secure work offered by the public administration is also growing. If before the pandemic this group was 16% of the student body, it currently reaches 24% of the total number of students.
"What we have found is that, fortunately, the entrepreneurial tone is recovering, although we will never reach the entrepreneurship rates that existed before the 2008 financial crisis, which have not been recovered. Its natural space is around 5% and we are not reaching 4% yet, although we are recovering little by little," said Rosa María Batista, director of Oepyme, who is also a professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), with respect to the population in general.
According to Batista, of all the information analyzed by the observatory, "the surprise has been university entrepreneurship, which has tripled after the pandemic".
"Before they only wanted to be civil servants, and now they don't. In addition, it is surprising to see that students of Humanities, instead of thinking about taking exams to end up teaching, are developing their own ventures in collaboration with colleagues from other degrees and that is great news," she said.
Asked about the sectors towards which these entrepreneurial university students are directing their projects, Batista said that "there is everything, from services to small-scale productive issues, obviously, because they combine these processes with their studies".
In her opinion, "the pandemic has changed people's schemes a lot. We already saw that this generation was much more entrepreneurial than the previous one, but there are 14% of students who say that entrepreneurship is the only option they are considering. I think they are betting on the freedom that comes with developing their own project, they long for that freedom and, perhaps, that is what leads them to entrepreneurship. What they sometimes do not value is that entrepreneurship implies working hard and for a long time".