Advising Entrepreneurial Students
7.0 What else can the Careers Service do for entrepreneurial students?
For all Careers Services the basic role is to provide support for students in exploring their career options. At the minimum this can be done by sign-posting to other organisations and to appropriate resources. However, many Careers Services carry out a much wider role in promoting enterprise and entrepreneurship, either themselves or in co-operation with internal and external bodies
7.1 How can the Careers Service further improve advice to entrepreneurial students?
7.2 Applying 'AIDA' to advising students
7.3 'Graduate Enterprise': an early success in raising awareness and interest
7.4 Current ‘Enterprise Awareness' Schemes
7.5 Careers Service 'Best Practice'
7.6 Snippets of best practice
7.7 What advice does the NCGE give?
7.8 Co-operation with other organisations
7.9 Implications for you
7.1 How can the Careers Service further improve advice to entrepreneurial students?
Some evidence from NCGE research suggests that entrepreneurial students do not look to the Careers Service for advice. Those that do so are not always satisfied. This may be partly due to such students not really knowing what help they need or what the Careers Service can offer. It may also be that the Careers Services are less confident about dealing with entrepreneurial students.
Questions to ask yourself include:
You will have to decide how much of your scarce resources should you devote to entrepreneurial or potentially entrepreneurial students. If you feel that you and your team are not doing enough, this material should help you to decide what else you should do.
In many cases your Careers Services do things in partnership with other organisations and projects that are being funded specifically to boost enterprise in students. Your role might be mainly as a route through which the projects can make initial contact with students, or you might want to be more proactive by sign-posting and in organising activities and events.
Evidence from a selection of Careers Services around the UK shows that there are a range of models to choose from.
7.2 Applying 'AIDA' to advising students
This section describes an approach you may wish to take in raising awareness of entrepreneurial careers.
In sales there is an acronym: AIDA which refers to Awareness [of product], Interest [in product], Desire [for product], Action [buy product].
You can adapt this to apply to the process that your Careers Service might decide to follow to encourage entrepreneurial students.
This closely mirrors the familiar ‘DOTS’ model of career guidance – assisting the student with self-awareness, opportunity awareness, decision-making skills, and transition skills.
7.3 'Graduate Enterprise': an early success in raising awareness and interest
There have been many government funded schemes to raise the 'enterprise' agenda. Each makes a contribution to the process of raising awareness of entrepreneurial careers, and you should make sure that your students have access to current schemes.
One of the earliest to focus specifically on the career choices of students approaching graduation was 'Graduate Enterprise', in the early 1990's
The Graduate Enterprise Programme was designed to raise student awareness of the business start-up option. For instance in one region presentations on starting a business were given to final year students in all the Universities. Many attended the events, which were set up by the local Careers Services. About a quarter of those who attended were then selected for follow-on residential enterprise weekends at which they investigated a business idea in more depth, to test its feasibility. At the end of the week-ends, about half the students had decided that running a business was more difficult than they had thought, and abandoned the idea. The other half pursued the option further. Both were regarded as good outcomes - there is no point in a graduate wasting time and money pursuing a poor business idea.
The scheme appeared to be very successful, especially if linked to a follow-on business start-up programme. In some regions there is still an ‘alumni’ of ex-participants running businesses (including some of the University staff, who became infected with the entrepreneurial bug). Sadly, this initiative was discontinued shortly after a very successful evaluation - like so many Government funded schemes.
7.4 Current ‘Enterprise Awareness' schemes
Currently ‘enterprise’ is much more on the agenda of schools as well as HEIs so your Careers Services may not need not get so directly involved in developing awareness, but you should still be prepared to build on it. As a minimum you should ensure that you know of enterprise activities going on, and encourage students to attend them, especially as they approach key career decision points. To achieve this you will need to know who is dealing with enterprise and communicate with them regularly.
Section 8.0 has more information about a wide range of enterprise and entrepreneurship activities in HEIs in the UK
7.5 Careers Service 'Best Practice'
Not surprisingly there is no single 'best practice'. A practice which is best for one University may not be at at all the best for another.
Practices seem to fall into four categories, depending situation the Careers Service is in:
a) Sign-posting support for entrepreneurial students, usually because its done elsewhere on the campus. Several Universities have dedicated teams, outside the Careers Service, to encourage enterprise and business start-up. The Careers Service signposts any entrepreneurial students to paper-based or web-based resources and direct to the enterprise team. The Service is not directly involved in promoting enterprise.
b) Co-operative support based on working closely with an enterprise team elsewhere on the campus. These Careers Services actively promote awareness of entrepreneurial careers, and then signpost students to the enterprise resources and team. They usually have some advisers who are aware of the issues facing entrepreneurial students.
c) Active support involving awareness events, a wide range of resources fro students, and advisers dedicated to helping students explore enterprise options. Students are sign-posted to business start-up specialists if they want to start a business straight away.
d) Full range support, which is similar to the above, but the Service also has business advisers working in close partnership with the Careers Service team and who may run simple business start-up events in which they go beyond awareness and into the initial stages of assessing the student's business idea.
Which model to adopt is a policy decision for your Careers Service, and will depend on the other enterprise support on the campus, the resources available, and the interests and motivations of the team. In general, the full range support model should only be set up if the Service can draw upon staff who have real business start-up and business advisory experience.
These items are ‘snippets’ of best practice volunteered by Careers Professionals when they responded to the questionnaire about the things they would like to see in the new materials.
See Section 8.0 for more detailed examples
a) Programmes: Here we've been running enterprise and entrepreneurship programmes for several years now and have just devised and started delivering the HEI's over-arching Student Entrepreneurship Programme for the next 3 years.
b) Lead role : I understand that we are the only careers service in the UK to be the formal Entrepreneurship Champions for their institution.
c) Student networks: Here we have 2 networks we call Fast Forward to encourage students thinking of working for themselves. At other locations it has been running since last summer. I go when I can to the evening session and have used this to help plug some of the gaps in my knowledge. These sessions are actually run by the Uni's Small Business Advisers. I have run sessions for the MultiMedia students for a couple of years on this - mainly making them aware of the option and what they need to think about. I took the content from my husband's experience of a week long course run by the local Business link.
d) HEI networks: It is not just careers services who are involved in this. They need to find out who else within their institution has a part to play. This is also something for the NCGE to consider in its strategy - making sure that they contact and talk to all the interested parties within HE institutions and encourage collaboration as much as possible.
e) Regional networks: The Southern Group have made entrepreneurship a running agenda item and we have had meetings with our RDA who have invited us onto their Higher Education Enterprise Group. We regularly share good practice
f) Business advice : I have a background in banking and venture capital and tend to advise student start ups, also I have started to consider running seminars on Commercial Awareness.
g) Referrals: We refer students to the Centre for Entrepreneurship electives and the Entrepreneurship Network which puts students in touch with successful entrepreneurs. We need not take risks in giving advice as there is the Centre and Research & Consultancy Services which have a depth of expertise in these areas.
h) Centres of Entrepreneurship: We have a Centre for Entrepreneurship, Research & Consultancy Services, Entrepreneurship Network, Enterprise Business Gateway, Institute for Enterprise
i) HEI-wide need: All of our students need this sort of help! Although some more than others ie it’s already arranged for Art and Design students, horticultural students, Product Design etc but nearly all the courses at our vocational HEI can have potential for more enterprise input.
7.7 What advice does the NCGE give?
The NCGE believes that Higher Education (HE) institutions play a significant role in the development of entrepreneurial attitudes, aspirations and capabilities in their students in order to prepare them for their future careers in employment and self-employment. The general expectation is that today’s graduates are likely to have many different jobs and forms of employment throughout their lives as globalisation and technology change the nature of work and its role in society.
The NCGE has developed a framework which can be used to monitor and develop the encouragement of entrepreneurship by a University as a whole. It is based on a series of desirable outcomes which together make up ‘entrepreneurship’.
- Entrepreneurial behaviours, attitudes and skills
-
Empathy with the life world of the entrepreneur
- Key entrepreneurial values
- Motivation toward an entrepreneurial career
- Understanding of the processes of venture creation, entry and associated tasks
- Generic entrepreneurship competencies
- Key minimum business how to’s
- Effective management of stakeholder relationships
Careers Services have a part to play in this, along with other organisations inside and outside the University, that they might be working with. The framework is a good starting point to jointly plan how the outcomes can be achieved.
Click here to see more details
7.8 Co-operation with other organisations
Across the UK there are many different models of Careers Service. A feature of most of them, whatever their size or shape, is the way they work with other organisations inside or outside the University.
The extent of co-operation will depend on the opportunities that are accessible, and which of the models referred to above the Careers Service aspires to. Examples include:
a) Working closely with a 'Centre for Enterprise' elsewhere in the University to:
- raise awareness of enterprise and entrepreneurship among undergraduates
- run events and competitions (eg Business Plan competitions)
- run modules in the curriculum, especially for those subjects where self-employment is common
- provide resources and links for those interested in setting up business or social enterprises
- provide one-to-one support and advice on business issues.
b) Working with external organisations, such as Business Link or Princes Trust, to provide many of the above services.
c) Having a list of trusted business advisers to refer students to if they need help with their business ideas.
Even if you are only a little involved in these joint activities they will greatly enhance your understanding of the issues facing the entrepreneurial students, and their ability to sign-post them accurately.
As a minimum your Careers Service needs to ensure that it has up-to-date lists of appropriate contacts and preferably refreshes these regularly by meeting with them, perhaps as a group, to discuss the issues.
7.9 Implications for you
Your Careers Service needs to have an approach which is appropriate for all kinds of entrepreneurial careers, and not just business start-ups. Although you will probably wish to avoid 'promoting' an entrepreneurial career, you need to be an active part of the network of activities in the HEI that promote awareness of the possibilities.
At the very least you need to know what is going on and have links with other parts of your HEI, or with external organisations, that are involved in enterprise/entrepreneurship. There also need to be agreed referral mechanisms.