Career Development and Student Entrepreneurship for University-to-Work Transition in Emerging Economies

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Introduction

This call for papers to our special issue aims to attract empirical findings, using qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods approaches, on how student entrepreneurship affects the university-to-work transition in emerging economies. We focus specifically on how students’ entrepreneurial experiences during university education contribute to their career development, the development of employability skills, and readiness for entry into the labour market.

University-to-work transition describes the process by which university students navigate the shift from their educational responsibilities to graduation and subsequent entry into the labour market. This definition clarifies the ambiguity associated with the term ‘school-to-work transition’ within the career development, graduate employability, and worker employability literature (Donald and Healy, 2024; Donald and Mouratidou, 2022). The university-to-work transition is often influenced by factors such as employability skills, career readiness, employers’ willingness, labour market and institutional support systems (Okolie, 2022). In this context, we refer to career development as a continuous process through which students acquire or develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes and experiences they require through engaging in entrepreneurial activities to make informed career choices and succeed in their transition to the workforce.

Research on employability teaching, digital competence, and capability-based curricula (Shtaltovna and Muzzu, 2021; Jakubik et al., 2023) demonstrates how universities can intentionally focus on adaptability, lifelong employability and inner development (Shtaltovna and Makhachashvili, 2025; Shtaltovna et al., 2024). However, while several studies have focused on the role of higher education in facilitating graduates’ entry into the labour market (Blokker et al., 2025; Elom et al., 2024; Findeisen et al., 2022), there are sparse empirical findings about how student entrepreneurship affects university-to-work transition.

Evidence suggests that student entrepreneurship offers hands-on experience of real-world skills development opportunities, and can serve as an experiential learning platform through which students might develop and apply employability and career-related skills (Donald et al., 2024; Mouratidou et al., 2024). A previous study (Okunuga and Ajeyalemi, 2018) identified a set of employability skills that higher education graduates require for entry into the labour market, particularly in an emerging economy; however, we know little about how university students’ entrepreneurial activities while schooling might facilitate or hinder the development of these essential employability skills and entry into the labour market. Hence, the need for the current special issue.

The contributions of the special issue would include;

1. Understanding how students’ entrepreneurial activities could affect their career development and employability.
2. Learning new ways through which student entrepreneurship could enhance or hinder the university-to-work transition among students in emerging economies.
3. Exploring institutional and contextual factors that may likely affect the impact of student entrepreneurship on the university-to-work transition.
4. Discussing students’ (higher education and TVET) perceptions of and experience of operating micro-businesses while simultaneously schooling under limited resources (i.e., conditional student entrepreneurship) and the impact on shaping their readiness and adaptability to the labour market, and
5. Understanding the extent to which students’ participation in entrepreneurial activities during schooling affects a smoother transition to work, among others.

Through our special issue, we expect to provide insightful contributions to theory and practice in the areas of youth empowerment, job creation and inclusive economic growth across emerging economies. Empirical findings from the published papers from different continents will inform education policymakers, university administrators and industry experts on better ways to improve graduates’ entry into the labour market and their inner development goals (IDG). Specifically, the special issue will contribute to addressing the following UN-SDGs:

SDG 4: Quality Education: The special issue will contribute to promoting quality education by emphasising hands-on entrepreneurial learning and skills development within higher education in emerging economies. Through contributions from papers focusing on SDG4, more students can develop more relevant skills for entry into the labour market.

SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth: Contributions from empirical findings can encourage productive activities, decent job creation and entrepreneurship as a career among the students.

SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure: The special issue can contribute to opportunities for more industry and higher education collaborations to nurture innovations in the emerging economies.

SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities: The special issue can contribute to reducing inequality by offering insights into how student entrepreneurship might empower disadvantaged students and promote their equal access to jobs despite their gender, location and backgrounds.

SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals: The special issue can create opportunities for international collaborations among researchers across continents. This promotes knowledge-sharing in research and innovation.

List of Topic Areas

Theme 1: Student Entrepreneurial Activities as a Pathway to University-to-Work Transition: This theme can focus on exploring how and whether students’engagement in small and micro-businesses might facilitate or hinder their transition into the labour market.

Theme 2: Career Development and Employability Skills Acquisition: This theme focuses on exploring how and whether students’ entrepreneurial engagement contributes to or hinders the development of essential employability skills and career readiness.

Theme 3: Institutional and Contextual Factors in Emerging Economies: Exploring how factors such as institutional support, government policies, culture and economic conditions shape student entrepreneurship and university-to-work transition outcomes.

Theme 4: Cross-regional Comparative Insights & Theoretical Advancement: Examining comparative perspectives on how student entrepreneurship affects university-to-work transition in different regions, building on existing theories or new ones to expand conceptual understanding of the student entrepreneurship and university-to-work transition nexus.

Theme 5: Inner Development Goals and the Human Dimension of Entrepreneurship: Integration of the IDGuide into entrepreneurship and business education, and how cognitive, social, and self-leadership competencies promote entrepreneurial behaviour and employability among students.

Note One: Career Development International will no longer accept quantitative submissions based on cross-sectional data from January 2026. Therefore, we encourage interested researchers to submit quantitative research that employs longitudinal, time-lag, etc. Qualitative research that employes single source or multiple data collection approaches to promote data triangulation and rigour is welcome.

Note Two: As Career Development International is a career development journal, submissions to this special issue should ensure that the majority of citations are to literature published in career development journals, supplemented by works from other fields, such as higher education. Submissions that are predominantly engaging with higher education literature rather than career development literature will be desk rejected and are more suited to a higher education journal.

Guest Editors 

Dr. Ugochukwu Chinonso Okolie, African Center for Career Enhancement and Skills Support (ACCESS), Institute for African Studies, Leipzig University, Germany. nonyeck@gmail.com

Prof. Dr. Yuliya Shtaltovna, HS Fresenius, Germany & Kyiv School of Economics, Ukraine. y.shtaltovna@gmail.com

Dr. Paul Agu Igwe, University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. paul.igwe@hotmail.co.uk

Dr. Priscilla Bahaw, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. prislk@hotmail.com

Dr. Chibueze Tobias Orji, University of Nigeria, Nsukka and University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. chibueze.orji@wits.ac.za

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

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Author Guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st November 2025

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 1st October 2026