Advising Entrepreneurial Students
3.0 What is an entrepreneurial career?
The concept of an entrepreneurial career, or a career in entrepreneurship may sound strange but it is analogous in some ways to a 'career in management'.
3.1 What is any career?
3.2 A traditional career
3.3 An entrepreneurial career
3.4 Managing an entrepreneurial career
3.5 Implications for Careers Professionals
3.1 What is any career?
You will be well aware that a career is much more than a succession of jobs. It could be described as the sequence of a person’s life, work, roles, learning and experiences. Another way of looking at it is that it is the work-related progress and development of the person during their working life.
To borrow from Maslow:
A career is something by which we define ourselves and our place in our families and our communities. It should enable us to realise our ambitions and build a reputation to be proud of.
Even in the changing work environment of today, where a ‘job for life’ is a rarity, it is still possible to talk about someone’s career in terms of their identity, their ambitions, their self-development, and the end-point they aspire to reach, as well as their actual work history. The difference from the past is that the career will be more of a portfolio of episodes than a single clear progression within one organisation.
A career is shaped by a wide range of factors, which will be present in students to varying degrees:
The idea of a planned career path is weakening in favour of following a series of stepping stones.
Your skill is to help the student to recognise these factors and make the appropriate choice for the first of these steps in their career.
3.2 A traditional career
Traditional careers have taken take many forms, each of which in the past had a well-established pattern, but they too are changing. Typical examples are shown below.
My career |
Who am I? |
My ambition? |
My self-development? |
Target end-point? |
A career in public service?
|
I am a civil servant
|
My ambition is to be a senior grade civil servant |
I can study for Civil Service qualifications |
Recognition of selfless service and a good pension. |
A career in engineering?
|
I am a civil engineer
|
My ambition is to build exciting new bridges
|
I can build on my engineering qualifications as technology changes |
I can become a Senior Fellow of the Institute and stand for election as an Officer |
An academic career |
I am an academic in a University |
My ambition is to be a Professor soon, then a Dean, or else to become a world expert, or a renowned educator |
I can build up an impressive list of publications and become a sought after conference speaker |
Lecture tours across the world, and lucrative consultancy. |
A career in management?
|
I am a professional manager
|
My ambition is to be a senior manager in almost any sector
|
I can become a Chartered Manager or take an MBA |
A good retirement package. Guest speaker on MBA programmes. |
Each of these can, in addition, be described as enterprising, or even intrapreneurial.
An enterprising career?
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Any of the above careers done well, and potentially rising to a very respectable level in the organisation. Finish on a ‘high’ with a good retirement package. |
An intrapreneurial career?
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Any of the above careers, with a record of tackling difficult tasks well, shaking things up and initiating major changes within organisations. Probably finish up as an acknowledged major player with an ongoing role amongst the great and the good nationally or regionally.
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People who are particularly strong on enterprising attributes or intrapreneurial capabilities will probably easily cope with the 'portfolio career'. Those who are less enterprising will probably find that the uncertainties, the changing environments, and the continual need for new learning are difficult to cope with.
3.3 An ‘entrepreneurial career’?
An entrepreneurial career is harder to describe, as it follows a much wider range of patterns.
An entrepreneurial career? |
Any of the above sectors but not pursuing the mainstream ‘career routes’. A track record of initiating and exploiting exciting opportunities, and then moving on to the next one, probably by setting up new ventures. Probably shifting sector several times during working life. Possibly including a period of intrapreneurship. Might turn out to be very successful, due to an intuitive knack of picking winners, and making them work, or a series of ambitious failures.
|
In some ways it’s easier to talk of a ‘career in entrepreneurship’.
My career |
Who am I? |
My ambition? |
My self-development? |
Target end-point? |
A career in entrepreneurship
|
I am an entrepreneur
|
My ambition is to explore exciting opportunities and start many new ventures. I want to change the ways things are done. |
I will be my own boss and I will develop by networking with other entrepreneurs, and by trying things and learning from my mistakes. I will relentlessly pursue my goals |
I aim to become very rich and/or influential. A face that everyone recognises and a reputation for doing surprising things. A record of changing the ways things are done. |
Described in this way it is clearer that it is a career which is not based on a subject area, like the older professions, but on a collection of personal attributes, goals and aspirations, much like a career in management.
3.4 Managing an entrepreneurial career
In many careers opportunities arise and either are taken, or missed. Looking back most people can identify serendipitous events which proved to be turning points. Even in a ‘traditional’ career within an organisation, progress will often depend on a degree of luck.
Enterprising employees make their own luck by the sort of ‘strategic awareness’ that lead them to develop themselves, their networks, and their options and grab the opportunities when they arise. They equally know when to pass up an opportunity that is not leading them in the right direction.
For the entrepreneurs, shifting from one venture to another, this is even more important. They don’t have the safety net of the corporate career to fall back on, or colleagues to measure themselves against. Nor can they say with such clarity that a particular opportunity should be taken or passed by. They take risks; calculated risks, but sometimes big risks.
The entrepreneurial career involves more than just choices about work. It inevitably includes complex inter-relationships between work life, family life and personal life. There is a stronger sense of control over ones own destiny, but also even more uncertainty than there is in a more traditional career. Other sections in this material therefore explore some of these issues.
Click here to see some case studies of entrepreneurial careers
You should think of an entrepreneurial career as an entity in its own right, like many other more traditional career paths. As with many careers it can take place in one sector (eg an entrepreneur in the publishing sector) or it can cover many sectors and situations, including intrapreneurship. Students should be made aware of this way of thinking about their careers, and be guided to think about the best starting point for their own career.