Transcript ENTREPRENEURSHIP: from opportunity to action: Where do we

‘Are enterprising students &
graduates more employable?’
Professor David Rae
Enterprise Research & Development Unit
Lincoln Business School
University of Lincoln
[email protected]
© David Rae 2007
Entrepreneurial career planning
‘Are enterprising students/graduates
more employable?’
..If so, how can we help them to develop:
• A sense of the opportunities open to them and how to
take advantage of these?
• Creative ideas for starting and making their career?
• Confidence and experience to develop their personal
marketability?
• From this session, you can consider how students could
use a career planning approach to:
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assess & evaluate their personal enterprise
review & develop their career goals
develop an entrepreneurial career plan
develop their skills in entrepreneurial and career networking
Entrepreneurial career planning
Career challenges for students &
graduates
Or why it’s hard to get started!
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Increasing numbers of students & graduates:
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‘How am I different?’
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Declining ’traditional’ career opportunities in
professions & large organisations
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Rise in agency, casual & temping – minimum wage
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Competition for jobs with economic migrants
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Graduate-small company mismatch in expectations
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Graduates don’t display employable & relevant skills?
Entrepreneurial career planning
Finding Career Opportunities
According to Charles Handy (1990)
“Although we may experience a shortage of jobs,
there will never be a shortage of work to be done.”
According to William Bridges (1997)
“We should look for the work that needs doing and
present ourselves to who ever needs it as the best
way of getting it done.”
Entrepreneurial career planning
Generic skills for personal enterprise & employability
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Does having these skilIs make me employable?
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Personal
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People
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Personal organisation and time management
Self-confidence and self-efficacy
Finding opportunities and taking the initiative to act on opportunities
Creative thinking and problem solving
Being able to take decisions and accept risks in conditions of uncertainty
Setting goals and persevering to achieve goals
Working independently
Participating in networks
Self presentation
Negotiation, persuasion and influencing people
Team working effectively with others
Task
– Project management
– Being able to adapt and work flexibly in different contexts
– Taking responsibility for completing work to quality standards
Entrepreneurial career planning
Or is it about who I am?
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Who am I? What is my identity?
Who do I aspire to become?
What are my hopes and fears?
What makes me different? Unique?
What is my sense of self?
What stories do I tell about myself?
How aware am I of myself & how others see me?
How confident do I feel about myself?
What values and motivations are important to me?
What do I want to offer/give to other people?
How do I want to be rewarded?
Entrepreneurial career planning
Opportunity centred
entrepreneurship
Networking
Creating & using contacts
Communicating effectively
Self marketing
Learning from experience
What do I want?
Personal goals
Skills & strengths
Confidence & self efficacy
Values & motivations
Personal enterprise
Acting on
opportunity
OPPORTUNITY
CENTRED
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Planning:
Goals
What is success?
How-to?
Who with?
Resources
Planning to realise
opportunity
Entrepreneurial career planning
Creating &
exploring
opportunity
Creative thinking
Exploring ideas
Seeing needs as
opportunities
Taking initiative
An enterprising approach to making
your career is different, because:
• Normal approaches are about changing yourself to
conform to employers’ expectations
• Being enterprising means creating or changing their
expectations of who you are & what you can do for them
• Think & act as an entrepreneur: your career is your own
business!
• You are making and shaping your career
• To do this you need a plan…
Entrepreneurial career planning
Developing your entrepreneurial
career: why have a plan?
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A plan puts you in control; you decide and direct where
you want to go.
You are therefore much more likely to achieve your
goals.
A career plan is your personal business plan; your
entrepreneurial career is your core business
A plan will help you to develop and manage it
proactively and effectively by ‘making your own luck’
rather than hoping to ‘get lucky’.
Planning enables you to create new possibilities and to
think through how to achieve them.
The plan can help you to increase and maintain your
personal value in all senses - individual, business, and
financial.
Entrepreneurial career planning
Your future career lies within yourself &
is waiting to be discovered
Knowing
yourself
Identifying
opportunities
Being prepared
to stretch
yourself
Marketing
yourself
Mobilising your
resources
Entrepreneurial career planning
Career stage
Typical events
Entrepreneurial questions & options
Late
career/third
age
Seniority
Retirement
Develop wider interests
Divest from own business or
hire succession management
How to use existing contacts, expertise &
resources?
How to extend economic activity?
Self-employment, lifestyle business
Develop portfolio of interests
Social or community enterprise
Advisor, coach or non-executive roles
Career advance &
responsibility
Marketable skills & expertise
Reassess career direction
Unachieved aspirations
Redundancy
Parenting or caring
Career break/return to work
Changes in family
relationships
How to achieve successful career transition?
How to identify & develop opportunity
based on existing skills & experience?
Leave employment to start new business
Return to work or start own business
Consultancy
Management buy-in or buy-out
Create spin-out venture
Join or lead innovation project or venture
team
Grow existing or family business
Establish career direction
Develop skills & experience in
corporate, profession or small
business
Professional or technical
training/development
Expand social & work related
networks – social capital
Child rearing
Accumulate personal
resources
How to choose independence over
employment?
Learn entrepreneurial capabilities from
experienced people
Start own business
Creative innovation at work
Team member in innovation project, startup or spinout venture
Continue to work full or part time or
freelance
Early work experience
Development of social
networks
Quest for independence
Exploration & personal
growth
Partnering, possible marriage
How to develop skills, interests & social
contacts into enterprising projects?
Small scale ventures with friends
Graduate start-up
Vocational, further or higher
education/training
Academic or vocational
choices & specialisation
Family influences
How to turn interests and needs into
earning opportunities?
Enterprise education
Participation in family business
Enterprise in personal interests
Age 55+
Mid career
Entrepreneurial
career stage
framework
Age 35-54
Early career
Age 25-34
Initiation into
working life
Age: 16-24
Education &
early life
Age: 5 up to 21
Entrepreneurial career planning
Entrepreneurial career planning
Goals &
motivations
Ventures
Your
career
plan
Increasing
personal
value
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Building
networks
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Personal
learning
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What goals do you want to
achieve, and why?
How will you accomplish your
goals?
What is your personal value, how
can you increase this?
What do you need to learn in
order to achieve your goals, and
how will you gain this learning?
What networks will be helpful in
achieving this?
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Personal value:
-Self esteem
-Value to others as a person
-Value created by applying your abilities
-Know-how
Entrepreneurial career planning
-Reputation, social capital
-Financial value
Setting my career goals
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Who do I want to be?
What do I want….
….to do?
….to offer others?
….to learn?
….to achieve?
….to earn?
By when - milestones:
For 3 months, 6 months
1 year, 2 years, 5 years?
• What do I not want?
• What do I prefer to avoid?
Entrepreneurial career planning
Personal development exercises
for career planning (refer to chapter 3)
•Entrepreneurial learning model:
•Personal & social emergence
•Contextual learning
•Negotiated enterprise
•Personal values, goals & motivations
•Drawing your learning map
•Assessing fit between ideas & personal goals
•Personal orientation to risk & uncertainty
•Entrepreneurial & management capabilities (toolkit)
•Leadership & entrepreneurial teamwork
•Mapping your personal networks
•Review exercise
Entrepreneurial career planning
Career plan headings
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What I want to achieve
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My goals and motivations
My Personal Vision for the future:
These are the values which are most important to me:
These are my Life Goals for:
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Business
Career
Personal growth
Family
Social
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Timescales for when each goal is to be achieved and how success will be measured
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Increasing my personal value
My value to myself and to others is based on:
Ways in which I aim to build on my personal qualities to develop my career further:
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Financial value
I aim to increase the value of my total net financial assets to:
I aim to increase my annual financial income to:
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How I will achieve my goals
These are my plans for how I will achieve each of my goals:
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Personal learning
These are my goals for learning, through which I will be able to achieve my life goals:
Entrepreneurial career planning
Sources of entrepreneurial learning
Discoveryincidental
Experimentingproject based
Business
school, college,
institute
Information
search (library,
Internet)
ACTIVE
practical
learning
Trial & error iterative
Sources of
entrepreneurial
learning
FORMAL
Theoretical
learning
Training,
development
courses
Problem solving
Distance
learning
Working in a
business to
acquire
capability
Networks &
other
entrepreneurs
Competitors
SOCIAL
Learning from
others
Role model,
exemplars
Mentors
Customers
& Suppliers
Entrepreneurial career planning
Experts,
Advisers
Seven suggestions for managing your career plan
1. Think of your plan as a dynamic agenda which evolves and changes as
you learn and progress.
2. Reward yourself for your successes; use each achievement as a
motivator to spur you on to greater challenges.
3. Encourage yourself to learn continuously and work at capabilities which
you need to develop, engaging less favoured as well as your preferred
ways of learning.
4. Find someone who can help you as your mentor, such as an
experienced entrepreneur who is prepared to listen and coach you
through critical moments.
5. Check regularly how you are progressing against your goals and the
plan - review what works for you and what does not, and update your
plan and personal theory.
6. Learn from achievements, setbacks and failure: analyse why they
happened, what you could have identified earlier and how to act
differently in future.
7. Keep moving forward; search constantly for opportunities, evaluate
them, plan how they can be exploited, and act on those you judge to be
the best prospects.
Entrepreneurial career planning
Draw a map of your personal & career network
Prof 1
Prof 3
Prof 2
Group
3
Group
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Group
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Friend
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Friend
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Friend
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You
Assoc
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Assoc
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Assoc
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Networking activity:
action-learning to develop skills and confidence
• Identify a need, opportunity or question you want to explore
• Use your contacts or other research to identify a network where
you can find out more about the opportunity
• Negotiate your way into the group and attend the next possible
meeting - face-to-face contact is vital
• Talk to at least 10 people you have not met before
• Find out their interests, connections with your interests, & who
they know who could help you further
• Review your success in starting a new network and exploring your
opportunity
• Keep your promises to your new contacts
Entrepreneurial career planning
3 big questions in planning to network
• What do you offer?
What are the benefits & advantages you offer to other people, e.g.
your skills, knowledge, business idea, what it does?
• Who do you want to make connections with?
• Customers, investors, partners, experts, recommenders?
• Why will they be interested? What is their need, motivation or
interest?
• Is there a match with what you want, Y/N?
•If you are listening, the question is:
•How can I help this person?
•Be honest if you cannot, there is no match & move on
Entrepreneurial career planning
Entrepreneurial networking skills
• Create a distinctive and confident personal identity
• Who are you, what you are about, what is interesting and
memorable about you?
• Be strategic, purposive and focused in your choice of networks
and investment of time in them – which ones are useful and which
are not?
• Work towards getting to know the decision makers, resource
holders, experts, influencers and most useful people in your
chosen networks
• Practice conversational skills of listening and asking questions,
finding out about people’s needs, interests and their networks
• Manage contacts - keep a contact folder up to date, categorise
groups of contacts, e.g. news media people
Entrepreneurial career planning
Maintaining your networks
•Your network forms an important resource, and will be
more valuable if well maintained. Think about:
• How can you sustain your network of contacts to
promote their future co-operation?
• Who could be your future customers and investors?
• Who are the contacts you wish to develop?
• How can you grow your network?
• Do you need to develop more contacts in specific
domains, such as industry contacts and potential
investors?
Entrepreneurial career planning
Evaluate your network
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Is your network effective for your career goals?
Is it broad, deep, diverse, large?
Composed of people similar to/different from you?
Evaluate its structure, composition, focus
How does your desired network differ from your actual
network?
How to improve on this - access?
Effectiveness, quality of relationships?
Constraints, opportunities & choices in your network?
Access to resources, support & information?
Entrepreneurial career planning
Featured text:
Opportunity Centred
Entrepreneurship
‘Entrepreneurship: from Opportunity to Action’
© Professor David Rae: Palgrave MacMillan 2007
www.palgrave.com
Chapter 1 downloadable on website
Entrepreneurial career planning
‘Are enterprising students/graduates
more employable?’
• What do you think?
• How can we help students develop
enterprising approaches & skills?
• ‘What works’ for you, for students, for
employers?
Entrepreneurial career planning