How to enhance your entrepreneurial skills?

Sepideh Samadi

Senior Student Relations & Career Coordinator

 

With countries facing economic challenges across the globe, especially   given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become important that greater entrepreneurial activity should be encouraged and facilitated by governments. This is because there is a direct correlation between entrepreneurial activity and economic development. Entrepreneurs play an important role in society in terms of financial as well as human resources.

 

Young students have the enviable power of doing things with great courage and many now look to ditch the corporate rat race. Students of the present generation want to become their own bosses; they aspire to invent new things. The education system and educators can play an important role to motivate the young to become entrepreneurs or to apply entrepreneurial thinking to whatever path they follow in their future careers.

 

Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking – it is not constrained by the present and finds applicability in the future. It is important for students to develop entrepreneurial thinking skills right from school.

Now my point is to all students: if you think you have a new and creative idea, here are some tips which can help you in developing it:

 

  1. Be brave and challenge yourself: always keep in mind that thinking out of the box is creativity. Don’t be shy of talking about it. Be brave in bringing up any new idea that comes to your mind. Don’t worry at this stage if it makes sense or if it is yet attainable or not. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to challenge yourself and others. No one else is going to push you, so it is up to you to do it.
  2. Technical skills: improving your technical skills helps in producing a successful business product or service. The technical skills for a successful entrepreneur include communications, design, research and development, and environmental observation.
  3. Personal maturity skills: these include self-awareness, accountability, creativity and emotional skills.
  4. Be passionate: as an entrepreneur, you are going to have to put in long hours and make sacrifices for your business and your new idea. When you are passionate about it, putting in the long hours won’t feel like a sacrifice anymore.
  5. Trust yourself: being a successful entrepreneur means that you have learned to listen to your intuition and rely on your wisdom when making decisions. Your ability to trust and believe in yourself will show your confidence. People are more likely to follow and trust confident leaders.
  6. Network, network, network: there is no such thing as too much networking. Well, there is if it’s misdirected or inappropriate, but what I mean to say is that you shouldn’t ever stop networking because you never know where your next lead will come from.

 

Last, but not least, succeeding in business doesn’t require overnight success. In fact, that is largely a myth. Finding success as an entrepreneur is not an easy task, but with these simple tips, I hope it becomes just a little bit easier.

 

The British University in Dubai

Block 11, 1st and 2nd floor, Dubai International Academic City PO Box 345015, Dubai, UAE

Tel: +971 4 279 1400

Whatsapp:

Email: [email protected]