Developing Entrepreneurial Careers

There is a worldwide call to develop more entrepreneurs as a way to develop economies, and advocates favour entrepreneurial and vocational skill acquisition as the approach to empower people to create wealth or alleviate poverty. Thus, how can countries achieve this task? The following properly implemented, are needed, these variables include:

Policy

Entrepreneurial policy targeted toward the milieu and needs of specific groups e.g. female, youth etc in society can address the supply of entrepreneurs. The rest of the points below could be included when drafting entrepreneurial polices, of course like any policy the key to its success would be in the implementation.

School Based Career Guidance Service

The provision of career guidance in secondary and tertiary institutions enable young people understand the labour market, job opportunities and career choices. These support better choices regarding education, training and employment.

Community Career Guidance Centres

Similar to the first point, community career Guidance centres benefit those outside the school environment or those unemployed to access relevant career guidance, and/or training.

Self-Employment and Entrepreneurship

The opportunities for entrepreneurship need to be promoted more effectively and widely. More people need to understand self-employment is a viable career path and not a last resort. These should be accompanied with facilities to enable this option, like entrepreneurship training, access to technical and financial resources etc.

Entrepreneurship Education and Training

The opportunities for entrepreneurship education and training need to be readily available because "For the ordinary person to attempt overnight to create a new venture is tantamount to the person who cannot read music sitting down to compose a symphony. It is like a man who has never held a brush and palette in his hands essaying a portrait in the style of Rembrandt. The creation of a new business, like any form of creativity, is depended upon the mastery of the fundamentals" (Collins et al., 1964, p. 36). The beauty of it all is that research and practice have shown that entrepreneurship is teachable.

Vocational Training

Vocational training is very important and enables employability and entrepreneurial skills especially when tailored to meet market needs.

Science and Technology

Science and especially technology permeates the world, the world is now operating more or less a mobile economy. Although, there is an increase in techpreneurs, more people need assistance to take advantage of technological opportunities because ICT, the Internet and social media are powerful operational, selling, marketing and socialization forces.

Gender and Other Discriminated Groups

These groups make up about half of the world population; through meritocracy they should be included and given equal access to opportunities, economic resources, education, entrepreneurial training and mentorship to effectively contribute within their communities and by extension the world.

Role Models

The social and sometimes economic fabric of the world is built around role models, human beings copy behaviour hence more people need to be exposed to entrepreneurial role models and mentors. The first role model individuals are exposed to are parents, family or close mentors, if one is an entrepreneur then get dependents to work within the business, observe, practice and learn. Those without any entrepreneurial family members need to find other mentors to observe and learn from, preferably someone operating within their sector of interest. This is because role models are invaluable sources for social capital, networking, business knowledge and skills including emulating personality characteristics, such as, the ability to handle the fear of failure or risk tolerance. David Birch captures this risk-tolerance that "the entrepreneur needs to be able to handle risk, terror, and fear. How many times does the entrepreneur wake up in the middle of the night thinking about where the money is going to come from to pay salaries next week, the next negotiation with the major customer, and so on. How many people can deal with constant terror? Not many, I would argue. And whatever routine they go through to deal with this terror is what makes the entrepreneur successful" (Magnus, 2004, p. 291).

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Dr Beeka