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The Entrepreneurial Job Search
- Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of personal, business, and societal success by making informed decisions and taking responsibility for one's actions.
- Entrepreneurial people are skilled at making decisions, communicating, and planning action. They are focused, creative, innovative, motivated, and determined, and have the ability to change.
- Entrepreneurial skills are useful in business, government, and society. Using entrepreneurial skills can bring about change and improvement.
- The Entrepreneurial Decision-Making Cycle is a way of looking at all of the information you need to make a decision about your career.
- An informed career decision is one made using information from all the areas described in this cycle.
What this means for the Older Worker
- You are entrepreneurial when you use your creativity to make informed decisions, create action plans, and then carry them out.
- Developing and using your entrepreneurial skills is vital to a successful job search.
Once the term "entrepreneurial" only applied to a business owner. Now it describes the characteristics or "entrepreneurial skills" that can be used in all areas of life and work. If you recognize, develop, and use your entrepreneurial skills more effectively, you can make better decisions that can produce satisfying results.
The Entrepreneurial Decision-Making Cycle shows you what you'll need to make an informed career decision. It's important to put some effort into finding out whether you will like a career or a job before pursuing training or applying for that job. Think about how it meets your needs (financial and personal), fits with your values and interests, and whether or not you think you'll enjoy it. Use the cycle as your guide.
Entrepreneurial Decision-Making Cycle
Personal Vision: Who am I? What's important to me? These are the questions you will need to answer to understand your values, interests, skills, and work/lifestyle preferences. Then you will be better prepared to decide what type of work you are interested in.
Career Vision: Brainstorm ways you can do the type of work you have identified you would like by exploring occupations that fit with your Personal Vision.
Internal Analysis: Take a look at yourself: your skills (both learned skills and your job search skills), abilities, and experience. Are there other skills you need to learn? Are there gaps that need to be filled to fulfill your Career Vision? How can you fill those gaps?
External Analysis: Take a look at the work world around you. Research labour market information and discover what opportunities are out there. Find out where training is available, if you need it, and who can help you with your job search. You may need to revisit your Career Vision if the opportunities available are different than what you were looking for.
Overall Strategy: Clearly define the overall goal you want to achieve and come up with various ways to achieve it. This will include deciding where and how you will develop your skills, and what your job search strategy will be.
Planning and Preparation: This will be your actual step-by-step action plan. Review your research and make a list of things you need to do. This could include looking into the potential of finding employment in a certain field before taking a course, looking into financial assistance to take training, updating your résumé, preparing for an interview, and so on.
Action: Do it! Put your plan into motion and actually do the things you decided on in the Planning and Preparation stage.
Results: This can refer to either reaching your goal or not reaching your goal. If you haven't reached your goal, look back on what happened and discover what you might need to do differently in the future. Examples of reaching your goal are obtaining the job you want or going back to school for retraining.
* The arrows in the middle of the diagram indicate that if at any stage your idea does not seem to be working, go back to your Career Vision. You'll need to decide if it's still a good idea or if you need to adjust it. The idea is to never compromise your Personal Vision, as this vision contributes to meaningful work for you.
Things to think about
- The better your research and resulting information for each of the steps in the Entrepreneurial Decision-Making Cycle, the more likely you are to make an informed career decision that is a good fit for you.
- Setting goals is an important part of a focused job search strategy.
- With goals in place you can make an action plan and clearly see why you need to complete each action item. Thinking about what you need to do and completing these steps one at a time is much easier to do than trying to move ahead without a plan.
Things to do
- Use the diagram and explanations of the Entrepreneurial Decision-Making Cycle to help organize the tasks of your job search.
- Set clear S.M.A.R.T.S. goals for yourself:
Specific: A vague goal is easy to ignore; it is easier to achieve a specific and detailed goal.
Measurable: Have some way to measure your progress. Did you make three phone calls today? Did you work on a targeted résumé?
Achievable: Is your goal realistic?
Results: Does your goal say clearly what it is you hope to achieve?
Time limit: Set a deadline for your goal and the tasks. If your goal is big, you might want to break it down into several smaller goals and set time limits for each of them.
Shared: You will be more successful if you tell others who will be supportive, and who will ask about your progress. This will increase your commitment to finishing tasks. A career counsellor at your local career or job resource centre can help you with each of the stages in the decision-making cycle and can offer encouragement and support.
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