UNDERSTANDING triggering skills for ENTREPRENEURS: The case of ESIC

•The highest impact on entrepreneurial motivation was family environment.•The knowledge acquired in under-post graduate education help to create a business.•Key of success as entrepreneur is your personal initiative to undertake projects.•Young entrepreneurs see themselves as multifaceted and open to new experiences.•ESIC's students agree to learn entrepreneurial skills at University. The aim of this paper is to present the methodology and results of a study on the role played by an institution in higher education, the ESIC Business & Marketing School, in teaching different master's degree programmes to examine whether they respond to the demands of potential entrepreneurs who are seeking to acquire the tools and develop the skills necessary to eventually become successful. The main conclusions were that the students with the intention of achieving a higher level of entrepreneurial skills were enroled in the Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) programme without omitting other master's degree programmes also chosen by students with entrepreneurial concerns. It was also found that the variable with the highest impact on entrepreneurial motivation was family environment. Our data lead us to maintain that these students were not always going to start up a new business. The originality of this paper comes from our survey with 1,135 responses from the master's degree programmes taught in five cities in Spain with the inclusion of an analysis for LATAM students.