Entrepreneurship and employability skills
Discover your working personality type
Everyone has a working personality type – their unique combination of skills and personal qualities that they bring to work with them. Understanding who you are in professional contexts will help you to identify which careers would suit you and how to make the most of your skills. Take the quiz here [https://www.ucas.com/careers/buzz-quiz] on the UCAS website. Are you a unique and creative seahorse, a strong and determined polar bear, an eagle with a talent for leadership, or something else? Did anything about your result surprise you?
When putting together a team to work on a project, it can also be useful to be aware of your colleagues’ personalities and how they like to work. Imagine there someone on the team that likes to get things finished as efficiently as possible and is a bit of a perfectionist, while another person is very creative in coming up with ideas but can be disorganised. How could you help them work together as part of a successful team?
Review your skills
Conducting a ‘skills audit’ is a really useful activity in to help you work out what skills you already have and which skills you could develop to land your dream job.
First, watch this short video from BBC Bitesize on 4 Key Skills for Success at Work [https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zdxwy9q]. If you’re struggling to identify all the skills you already have, this could help [ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zmb32sg ]!
Now, complete your Career Smart Skills Audit here [ https://careersmart.org.uk/tools/career-test-skills-audit ]. Once you’ve rated how good you are at the different activities, the quiz will identify three key skills areas you might like to develop.
How will you develop these skills and how will you demonstrate them to potential employers on your CV? To develop your communication skills, you could start a blog. To gain experience of team working, you could join a sports team or get involved in clubs and societies in school or at university. A part time job or volunteering are excellent ways to demonstrate your time management skills. Write down the skills you want to work on and spend five minutes coming up with a plan for what you will do to develop them.
Think like an entrepreneur
Want to learn how to spot and take advantage of opportunities and to turn lemons into lemonade? Dr Christian Busch recommends cultivating a ‘serendipity mindset’, in other words, making your own luck.
Dr Busch gives the example of a company inventing the potato washing machine after discovering that farmers were using their washing machines to get the dirt off potatoes then complaining that they broke! Can you think of any examples in your own life when something didn’t go to plan but you ended up working out a much better solution than what you had originally intended? Alternatively, if you’d like to hear from young entrepreneurs on how they started their own businesses, BBC Bitesize has a great collection of interviews here.
Further Resources
There are so many resources out there to help you think about your future career.
The Prince’s Trust has videos to help you write a standout CV. Click here to find out more.
They even have templates for business plans. Click here to find our more.
The Careers section of the BBC Bitesize website [https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/careers] and Prospects.ac.uk are also packed with good advice [https://www.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/applying-for-jobs].
