ELCAMP

A Self-employment Career Option for Elite Athletes: Innovative Sport-focused Entrepreneurship Bootcamp

Background:

Elite athletes have an outstanding potential to become successful businessmen and women. The entrepreneurship is a career option for high-level athletes. They could use their skills, networks and profile to start their own business during or after their sporting career.

However, due to their busy schedule, they often miss out on specific education and training. Often athletes have not had the time to develop other interests so rely on their social capital when the time comes to find another career.

Due to intensive training and competition schedule, elite athletes have a hard time keeping up with the requirements of the labour market in terms of business career including self-employability.

For this reason, ELCAMP project is based on the “Bootcamp” approach, which is one of the most effective methods for them to keep up with this changing and developing labour market.

Objectives:

The special aims of the ELCAMP project are:

to develop and implement dual career support mechanism for elite and Paralympic athletes in order to start, develop, implement and scale their business ideas and transform them into socio-economic values for themselves and the sport industry;
to develop and implement an innovative entrepreneurship bootcamp curriculum, bootcamp training modules and toolkit that addresses the challenges faced by elite and Paralympic athletes on sport-focused entrepreneurship and
to improve the sport-focused entrepreneurship competencies of elite and Paralympic athletes via gamification-based learning, networking and mentoring platform in order to support employment of these athletes in sports labour market.