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Family business successors have three career options. They may find a job, start their own business or join their family business and eventually take it over. This broadens the scope of a common entrepreneurial dilemma of whether to start a new venture or seek hired employment. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the problem from multiple angles in two different socio-political environments.

A survey was conducted among senior students in 34 countries with 109,000 participants. Several influencing variables such as family business background, motivation for self-employment, university environment and family business performance were defined. The used multinomial logistic regression with categorical three-dimensional independent variable allows to capture the complexity of an individual’s approach to career choice intention taking into consideration family business performance, personal motives for self-employment and university support for entrepreneurship.

All hypotheses include succession intention as a central category. There is significant correlation between friendly and supportive environment for entrepreneurship at university and the successor’s career choice. Performing family business is positively connected with the succession preference compared to the other two career alternatives. In the market economy group, students, who attended at least one entrepreneurial course, exhibit a significant preference for succession compared to employment. Male students are more likely to choose succession career than employment and founding a new own venture than succession. Students with family business background exhibit significant preference towards succession.

Some EU countries have a common denominator of almost 50 years of communist regime experience, which broke the entrepreneurial tradition and for a couple of decades prolonged the development the market economy. The value of the study is in the model comparison of transition and market based economies in the EU.

Family businesses represent the largest share of small-sized firms in majority of economies around the world. Having in mind the global economic situation this trend is expected to be continued. With the goal of better understanding of the process of transferring the business to the next generation, which ensures a long-term success, the purpose of this paper is to investigate expectations of student’s with family business background.

The research addresses the issue of an individual’s perception of entrepreneurship and the related factors that influence individual’s decision on whether to build a career as an employee, become a successor of family business or start own business as an independent entrepreneur. The authors separately analyzed West European (data from another study), East European and Slovenian senior student population for the purpose of comparative study. Students were surveyed and binominal regression was used for statistics.

The results show differences between investigated populations and positions Slovenian students in the mean. The authors anticipate that differences are caused by historical, cultural and educational backgrounds. This challenging area is raising a lot of sub-questions for possible future research.

The value of the study is in the replication of the existing methodology from the benchmarking study and result comparison.