Entrepreneurship development centre: expanding the interpersonal skills through entrepreneurship co-curricular activities

There is a need to expand the fundamental interpersonal skills for university students by including innovation in the entrepreneurship co-curricular activities as core competencies. As students need to acquire core skills; they also want to build their own future. That is what the co-curriculum provides. For many students, it’s the co-curriculum that offers the most interesting, compelling, and institutionally-defining educational experiences. The co-curriculum does what the standard academic curriculum generally does not. It is developmental, transformative, and future-focused. It is also experiential, offering authentic, and hands-on learning. To better prepare the future workforce, the Entrepreneurship Development Centre (EDC) of International Islamic University Malaysia, broadened the educational content beyond traditional skills. The Centre, offers a rich co-curricular educational program for students that aims to create the next generation of knowledgeable, experienced professionals, and successful entrepreneurs, who can develop value-added innovations that can spur economic growth and continue to impact the quality of life for society. Within the co-curricular activities, EDC incorporates training and workshop for student experiences that seek to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. The EDC goals, target audience, and implementation strategy, is described with an evaluation tool to assess the program’s success in developing an entrepreneurial mindset. This study affirms to the argument that fostering the learning process through co-curricular activities in entrepreneurship education should focus on real-world experience. The programmes conducted by EDC were related to real world experience in order to involve the students in a realistic learning, which should lead to better entrepreneurial competencies and tendency, and ultimately to enriched their interpersona