Enternships

Natalie shares her view on City AM’s article on entrepreneurship (Thursday 19th Feb 2009 edition):

Much to my bemusement this morning, my weekly dose of City A.M, City Focus featured an article entitled ‘For you next job, you too can become an entrepreneur’.  Being an ‘entrepreneurs are fabulous’ evangelist I was obviously intrigued; I ended up thoroughly disappointed. Not only is the feature a sales pitch for university entrepreneurship programmes, it makes the programmes at Nottingham, City and Roehampton sound like taking an MA/MSc in Entrepreneurship is actually worth your time and money if you ‘really’ want to be an entrepreneur…or a ‘top-notch businessperson’ so says Timothy Barber, the journalist responsible for such drivel.

Firstly, as someone who has studied entrepreneurship, run a business and worked for a number of entrepreneurs, I can honestly say the former is the worst way to learn about starting a business venture. The courses are generally run by the least enterprising or entrepreneurial people you will ever meet, who think that putting the word ‘entrepreneurial’ in front of the marketing, finance and sales modules makes it an MSc in Entrepreneurship. If you really want to be an entrepreneur or indeed intrapreneur…work for a start-up, growing venture or established entrepreneur. Simple.

I have a friend who works for a well-known Dragon and just by doing her normal job, she has been on an entrepreneurial boot-camp from hell; emerging out the fire, wiser, more astute businesswise and confident in her abilities, she has also be promoted to a ‘Head of…’ at the age of 23, with a nice salary to boot.

Now, she could have gone and studied at one of the aforementioned universities…one of which I am currently studying at (what a hypocrite I am) and ironically writing this essay from. I have never seen any information about a ‘10m seed-fund’ or the Centre for Entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurship society doesn’t socialise outside of the business school. So tell me, where would you rather be, in a class reading entrepreneurial franchising 101, followed by even more entrepreneurial marketing 102; then call a university for an application.

But…If you want to really learn, change your way of thinking and have maximum impact and influence at the same time as developing your own project then apply for an Enternship…you’ll be glad you did!

(The opinions voiced above are not the opinions of any employers past or present and definitely not the opinions of the enternships team.)