Background: Higher vocational education (HVE) in China is expected to convert technical training into durable graduate employability, and provincial systems such as Yunnan’s must achieve this within smaller, less diversified regional economies. Sustainable entrepreneurship education is increasingly proposed as a route to stronger career agency, yet curriculum design in this setting is rarely anchored in observed labor-market behavior. Aim: Because publicly available, Yunnan-specific data linking entrepreneurship training to employability outcomes remain scarce, this study develops a preliminary, evidence-informed training framework rather than testing an intervention. Data and method: The empirical foundation is the Job-SDF benchmark, a multi-granularity record of monthly job-skill demand compiled from millions of Chinese online job advertisements over 2021–2023 (2335 skills; 14 occupation groups; 7 regional markets). Using a transparent secondary-analysis pipeline, aggregate, occupational, regional, concentration, structural-break and skill co-occurrence patterns were summarized and translated into curriculum components; one mid-sized regional market (Region 6) is treated as an illustrative mid-sized regional case, broadly comparable to a developing provincial economy such as Yunnan’s, rather than as a direct proxy for the province. Findings: Demand grew at a compound annual rate of 10.1 % with a recurring mid-year peak; it is highly concentrated (Gini = 0.85; the top 10% of skills absorb 76.3 % of demand); the illustrative regional case holds only 7.1 % of national demand; 64.7 % of aggregate skill series exhibit structural breaks; and high-demand skills resolve into five co-occurrence clusters. Contribution: These patterns are mapped onto a five-phase sustainable entrepreneurship training framework with a continuous-improvement loop. Limitations and future work: The dataset is not Yunnan-specific and its entities are anonymized; the framework is therefore preliminary and requires validation with primary, named data and a controlled pre–post design in Yunnan HVE institutions.

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