Next Gen Job Hunting: Be Entrepreneurial

Posted on June 8th, 2012 by Big Society Network

In the lead up to the e-education event on the 12th June Enternships.com founder Rajeeb Dey explains how this year’s graduates can learn to be more entrepreneurial.

This year’s graduates must feel like intrepid adventurers. They’ve just battled through three or four years of social and academic jungle, emerging into the sunlight, degree in hand, to look immediately upon the ominous sight of Mount Employment. They might have scaled a few peaks in the past, they may be experienced mountaineers, but none of them (and none of us) have ever seen such a monstrous and impassable mountain as the employment market in this Olympic year.

While employment has always been a competitive market, it was not long ago that you had a job for life. A single body of knowledge and a specific set of skills would set you up for a lifetime of profitable repetition of a well-defined role. That is simply not the case anymore. Our world is changing faster and faster and the set of skills we should be learning is not one that’s specific to any field, but rather will allow us to adapt and survive – like Darwin’s Galapagos finches, which adapted their beaks to environmental changes in a single generation.

Whether starting a career or changing it, job seekers need to learn an entrepreneurial attitude. Graduates in particular, with little relevant experience, must learn to expand and exploit their network, to be innovative and creative job seekers, and to be resilient and mature in the face of expected failure. Most importantly, we all must learn that the traditional routes into employment remain extant only in the extreme minority of cases.

So how do you learn an entrepreneurial attitude? Enternships.com is an on-line platform where you can find a range of internships at fast-growing start-ups and innovative small companies. An ‘entrepreneurial internship’ – an enternship – is a practical and effective way to learn a powerful independence, expand your network within a particular field and inspire a creative and innovative approach to life. The day-to-day running of a business, of which interns get an immediate experience, quickly develops the kind of skills necessary either to be creative within a workplace (intrapreneurship) or even to start your own business.

In the near future, Enternships.com is developing digital tools to help interns get the most from their ‘enternship’, including, for example, the ability to set goals, measure their achievement and record feedback. Our aim is to give students and graduates every opportunity to learn all the skills they’ll need to scale the monstrous Mount Employment; and hopefully to become employers themselves.

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