Many graduates often think entrepreneurial skills are only necessary if they intend to start their own business. But the truth is that employers are constantly seeking an entrepreneurial mindset in their graduate hires. Such graduates are considered assets because they would be able to spot gaps in the market and innovate, and because they know how to ensure their work contributes to their employer’s continuous growth.
As a graduate job seeker, you can showcase your strengths in this area by demonstrating the ability to work independently, have original thinking, as well as showcase sound business sense and an interest in the market that your potential employer operates in. Here are some tips on how you can cultivate and demonstrate this skill.
What are Entrepreneurial Skills?
In a nutshell, entrepreneurial skills are the ability to spot an untapped opportunity and make the most of it. This could range from identifying a gap in the market and filling it, to trying something new or improving an existing process to increase efficiency and/or boost results.
Entrepreneurial skills are effectively a combination of multiple other competencies and abilities. Some of these competencies include:
- Commercial Awareness: Having a sound sense of business goals and objectives, your target market, and broader marketplace trends and movements.
- Creativity: The ability to think outside the box and come up with interesting solutions, or the ability to take an untested idea or innovation and make it commercially viable.
- Risk Management: The ability to foresee and hedge against potential risks, challenges, and setbacks; making decisions that benefit the organisation without jeopardising its stability.
- Adaptability: Being able to pivot when needed, learn new skills, and adjust goals, plans, and ideas as new information comes to light.
- Communication and teamwork: Be able to convey ideas clearly, listen actively, negotiate, and collaborate with others to drive projects forward.
- Leadership: Leadership isn't just about managing people, it's about inspiring and guiding others toward a common goal. This also includes persuading others and gaining support for your ideas and plans.
How to Develop Entrepreneurial Skills
Entrepreneurial skills are typically cultivated in real-world scenarios, so you’ll need to be on the lookout for opportunities to exercise yours (and gain the evidence or results to prove it!). Here are some ways you can develop and practice this skillset:
- Work Experience
While you are undertaking your internships or part-time jobs, do your best to keep putting forward new ideas that can contribute to your employer’s business goals. And if you are put in charge of implementing them, that’s even better!
Many students often hesitate to do this because they are afraid of the consequences of failure. But in fact, learning how to take a healthy degree of risk and cultivating the resilience to keep pushing your ideas through setbacks or poor starts is part of developing entrepreneurial skills too.
- Get Involved with Student Societies
If you are part of a student society, be sure to get involved in initiatives like setting up a new event or devising new strategies to market the society to potential members.
Or perhaps you might decide to set up a new student society on your own. The process of getting it registered, pitching it new members, raising funds, or securing sponsors or venues for events is a great source of experience in gaining entrepreneurial skills.
- Start a Side Business
Setting up a side hustle to earn some extra money while you’re studying is another great source of entrepreneurial experience. This could be a small online business marketed at the general public, or something specifically serving the needs of your peers at university.
Whether the business truly takes off, just produces okay results, or ends up closing down is less important to potential employers. What matters more is the lessons you learned in the process of running it, which will give you great examples to showcase your entrepreneurial acumen to employers.
- Fund-Raising and Social Enterprise
Getting involved in raising funds for charities or NGOs is great practice for entrepreneurial skills. The same goes for being part of a social enterprise – that is, organisations that use business practices for social or environmental benefits.
You can check with your university careers services if they have dedicated schemes or programmes to help you get involved with specific causes or social enterprises. Likewise, if you are interning with a large employer, see if they have dedicated corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives you can be involved in too.
- Learn from Other Entrepreneurs
Read biographies, case studies, or articles about entrepreneurs you admire to see what you can learn from their stories and experiences. Attend workshops and talks about entrepreneurial skills and innovation and see what you can pick up from there as well.
Make an active effort to network with business leaders or entrepreneurs whenever possible. Ask them for insights, or get them to share their firsthand experiences with you. Having a network like that can be a huge impact on your mindset.
How to Demonstrate Entrepreneurial Skills to Employers
Once you've honed your entrepreneurial skills, the next crucial step is to effectively demonstrate them to prospective employers. Knowing how to showcase your entrepreneurial abilities at every step of the recruitment process can significantly enhance your employability and set you apart.
- CVs and Application Forms
Make use of CVs, cover letters, and questions in employer application forms to highlight your relevant entrepreneurial experiences and accomplishments. Do your best to give specific examples where you demonstrated such skills and use quantifiable achievements to illustrate their impact.
- Job Interviews
During employer interviews, use the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method to describe situations where you applied your entrepreneurial skills. Be prepared to discuss challenges you faced and how you overcame them.
You’ll have numerous opportunities during interviews to pitch your entrepreneurial abilities and achievements. This could be during questions about your personality, such as the following:
- “What is it that motivates you?”
- “Tell us about your most significant achievement to date.”
- “Who is the person you most admire, and why?”
Or, it could be when employers ask you questions to gauge your innovation, problem-solving, or commercial awareness skills. Some examples:
- “Give us an example of a time where you introduced an improvement.”
- “Tell us about the last time you encountered an unexpected problem. How did you resolve it?”
- “If I gave you RM100,000 to invest over the next year, what would you choose to invest in?”
- “Tell us about a time where you exceeded a customer’s expectations.”
- Assessment Centres
Employers typically test entrepreneurial skills through business case studies in assessment centres. This typically involves assessing information about a business in a particular situation and coming up with recommendations to benefit the company.
It will be easier to tackle this with confidence if your industry knowledge is up to date, so make sure you don’t slack off on that. You will usually be expected to present your recommendations to the hiring managers as well, so be prepared to flex your pitching and persuasion skills.
Remember to keep your eye on the broader business objectives and goals in play as you brainstorm your solution or field questions from hiring managers. Having an entrepreneurial mindset means having a clear vision of the opportunities that can arise from solving business problems, after all.
