Having a degree in entrepreneurship offers a chance to customize your career path. This educational flexibility means that you can enter into almost every industry you can imagine.
As an entrepreneur you can start your own business or manage someone else’s since you have comprehensive knowledge in solving real-world problems. So to answer the question “What can you do with an entrepreneurship degree,” explore this career guide to learn about your options.
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Is entrepreneurship a good career?
Your entrepreneurship degree offers many profitable ways to turn your genius idea into reality. Thanks to your ability to lead people and take risks to pursue the unthinkable.
Not everyone has the same goal when pursuing this career. Some may develop their own products, while others may franchise or start a company. In fact, there are 31.7 million small businesses in the U.S. alone. However, it’s a smart idea to create a business within the industry of your expertise.
Since entrepreneurs can wear many hats, you can apply your skills in any job role. So it’s important that you develop and master the necessary knacks to juggle various responsibilities.
Skills of a successful entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs face a lot of challenges throughout their careers. So having a broad range of hard and soft skills can help you succeed in various entrepreneurial careers.
- Leadership
Regardless if you’re taking a managerial role or not, entrepreneurs must have leadership skills not only to lead a team but also themselves. If you can set yourself as an example to your employees, they will also produce the same behavior within the company.
Every leader is also a good mentor. Your ability to teach, inspire, and motivate your team is key to the success of your business.
- Networking
Managing a business is not simple. With 65% of businesses failing within 10 years, networking has never been more valuable. Just by reaching out to people you can grow your brand awareness, especially during the first years of your business or startup.
Consider networking to gain insightful advice from experts in your industry. These people can give you recommendations and tips to grow your business and save you from pitfalls.
- Technical skills
In this day and age, you need to know how to use software programs to run a business properly, like tracking sales and revenue, marketing and sales, hiring top talent, and measuring business growth.
- Communication
Entrepreneurs need to communicate with professionals in different positions. Whether they’re investors, employees, or clients, you must have the skill to adjust the words you use when delivering a proposal or providing an update.
For example, customers may not know technical business terms, so tailoring your communication approach can build lasting relationships. At the same time, you can avoid confusion and misunderstanding when you modify the way you communicate to people.
Effective communication skills is nothing without active listening.
Listening plays a huge role in business because without it, entrepreneurs won’t understand customer, team and stakeholder needs.
- Time management
Since entrepreneurs have a lot on their plate, having time management skills helps you organize tasks according to priority. The way you break down goals into manageable chunks lets the entire team stay on track with their responsibilities.
It would also be useful if you could incorporate technology into your organization. This will give you a bird’s eye view of your business performance despite having remote teams.
- Emotional Intelligence
Entrepreneurs who can empathize, and manage their own emotions affect how their team makes decisions. While some are born with high emotional intelligence, others think it’s something you can improve through practice. Nonetheless, it helps you become relatable to your employees, business partners and customers.
- Business management
Successful entrepreneurs acknowledge risk in putting up a business. That is why entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. But despite having an excellent business plan, if you can’t spot and fix any threats to your venture, your organization will ultimately fail. However, having risk management in your tool box will help you evaluate and control any unwanted pitfalls.
Top 8 careers for entrepreneurship
An entrepreneurship degree prepares you to enter any work environment. While the job can be challenging, succeeding as an entrepreneur can give you career satisfaction.
Here are the top 8 careers for future entrepreneurs:
Training and business development manager
Employees are an asset to companies. Your role as a training and development manager is to make sure that their staff are well-trained to do their work by developing training initiatives.
This job requires you to implement effective methods to educate, enhance, and recognize employee performance, guaranteeing that they meet the company’s expectations.
Social media specialist
Social media is the most popular platform for companies to advertise their products. So if you decide to become a social media specialist, you’ll be responsible for overseeing marketing strategies and overall customer service experience. Thus, your background knowledge in entrepreneurship holds a huge amount of advantage for managing a company’s social media accounts.
Advertising executive
Advertising executives make the final decisions on how to deliver a company’s brand awareness to consumers. Here, your job is to negotiate contracts with media outlets to advertise your products and services through online platforms and media programming. This will allow your company to reach a global network of potential customers.
Real estate broker
Real estate brokers are in charge of managing the transactions between sellers and buyers. Because of the negotiation skills you learned from your entrepreneurship degree, your duty as a real estate agent is to haggle sale prices, and drafting contracts to help them close deals. However, you still have to undergo additional training to set up your own real estate firm to understand specific laws and regulations in this industry.
Product manager
There are companies that innovate new products to meet the needs of the people. So they need product managers to supervise this process from conception all the way through to the finished product. With your entrepreneurship background, you can use this knowledge to enhance innovative ideas.
Project manager
Project managers delegate tasks and responsibilities to team members, ensuring that they’re within the scope of the set budget. This is where your leadership and time management skills come in handy. Your duties entail that every team member finishes their tasks on time while delivering excellent results. That’s why most entrepreneurs end up becoming project managers, because everything they learned is applicable to this role.
Public relations
Entrepreneurs know how to build relationships across industries. So your networking skills are vital if you want to succeed as a public relations specialist. This career requires you to connect with the press and public officials to communicate and manage the affairs of a company.
Business owner
Many entrepreneurs have a go-getter attitude and understand the risks in starting their own company. Doesn’t matter what type of business you want to establish after graduation because you can apply your entrepreneurial skills in all of them.
This business venture can be a marketing and sales firm, restaurant, health and fitness, and even photography.
Your entrepreneurship degree is customizable
A degree in entrepreneurship offers creativity and flexibility, giving you the freedom to pursue the career that speaks to you. Your unique ways of seeing the world through your unconventional ideas is what companies search for to launch a successful business from the ground up. With entrepreneurship under your belt, the world is your oyster.
Author at Skill Success and an outdoor enthusiast with a passion for an imperfectly zero-waste and minimalist lifestyle. She enjoys writing about leisure, traveling, self-help, or any topic that resonates with her belief.