The project objective is to study European best practices of youth entrepreneurship developmentand to implement them in Russia.The major challenge that young people face is that they live in a world dictating individual workand self-education: everybody has to establish his/her own position that makes sense and buildhis/her own trajectory of life. Our information environment doesn’t promote this tendency. Sincesuch important integral strengths as goal-setting, personal identity, self-management, timemanagement, and responsibility-taking cannot be developed themselves, young people have to beplaced into certain states facilitating development of these qualities.Entrepreneurship appears to be such a field where young people face the necessity of cultivatingthese abilities. It is the youth entrepreneurship that ensures development of clear goal-setting, selfmanagement, leadership, clear understanding of ideas to be implemented.By teaching fundamentals of entrepreneurship to young people, a significant contribution can bemade into the youth unemployment control. Youth business can be competitive thanks to talentedpeople and innovative ideas. In this case, young people should be given an opportunity to acquireknowledge and skills enabling them to play an active social role and to achieve personal fulfillment. To succeed in this focus area, it is necessary to apply not only our own experience but best practices of solving similar problems in other countries.Implementation of our project will allow studying European best practices of rise and developmentof small and medium businesses, identifying patterns of development of European entrepreneurship, and adapting current best practices in Magnitogorsk and other regions of theRussian Federation.

The Bologna process and EHEA brought necessary reforms to improve engineering education in Russia and Tajikistan. But despite obvious increase in attractiveness for young people engineering education is still facing many challenges. Drop-out rate among students majoring in engineering is almost 25%, employment rates for bachelor graduates decreases due to unwillingness of industry to employ engineers with 4 years of education, teaching staff is ageing and universities fail to create an effective system to retain young PhD graduates in engineering disciplines to perform teaching and research. One of the major unsolved problems behind these challenges is the deterioration of teacher training system in PC universities and irrelevance of teaching methods employed for engineering disciplines in Russia and Tajikistan. The answer to this problem is two-fold – modernization of pedagogic training of PhD students and development of sustainable system of lifelong education for university teachers of engineering disciplines. EXTEND seeks to promote a change in a system of pedagogic training of university teachers in engineering in RF and TJK through modernization of PhD programs curriculum and development of sustainable system of teacher re-training and consultation support by Network of Centres of Excellence in Engineering Education. The priority aim of the EXTEND project is to enhance the quality and the effectiveness of teaching. The project is targeted at solving of three specific problems: 1)The development of comprehensive model and descriptor of the competences of the university teacher of engineering disciplines;2) The establishment of Network of Centres of Excellence in Engineering Education (EXTEND centres) offering training courses, research and consultations in teaching engineering disciplines in PC HEI. 3) The development of training program for PhD students and university teachers in teaching engineering disciplines including MOOC.