Many institutions have recognized the importance of leadership and soft skills programmes and have begun to introduce these at school levels. But, an entrepreneurship course for students at K-12 school timetable itself?
Are we trying to catch them too young? Several national school boards have started offering the programme and many schools abroad offer this course to students from Grade IX onwards.
The objectives of such a programme can be plentiful. It can enable the school student to discover challenges and the rewards of entrepreneurship. Introduce them to an early business world by inducting in them business acumen. It can teach students the spirit of wealth creation and employment generation along with social responsibility, essentially grooming them to be job creators and not job seekers.
A typical entrepreneurship programme will focus on content and skill development for starting, owning and running successfully one's own business. It can throw early insight into the risks associated with owning a venture or firm.
Though entrepreneurship can be risky - since a lot of ventures hit the ground even before taking off — many established players consider it safer, more stable and secure than being employed elsewhere.
Learning how to formulate business ideas, studying growing markets such as Health Care & Wellness, Wireless and Communication and Clear Energy — Solar Power generation, will provide a head start. Doing a cost benefit and SWOT analysis can prove quite an edge to students at school, much before they venture out to college and learn commerce or management.
Law seems to be infusing into all aspects of work, so studying business law, appreciating legal contracts and agreements, understanding the company law matters of India and the Intellectual Property Protection are an additional overview that can stand any student in good stead.
It may even help students make a career choice, and help them decide if they enjoy doing finance and marketing, these forming the two integral aspects of any business. An enterprise owner is constantly concerned with the various sources of funding like debt and equity; various financial terms like fixed costs, gross profits; financial formulae like ROI, break even analysis; Balance sheet, Stocks and various Taxations. Marketing on the other hand involves positioning, branding, advertising and building competitive strategies to increase Sales.
Students who feel a serious lack of motivation in these areas must look to see if production or research can be areas that they will be passionate about. If the ups and downs related to business creation are not inspiring, it is a clear indication that the students must concentrate on achieving a professional degree from top rated universities to help secure a foothold in an industry as a professional employee.
If studying entrepreneurship at school has some pros, it has its cons too.This modern day world of consumerism will naturally make students overtly focus on the wealth creation part of the business, in this process students may lose their accountability towards giving back to society. Any business, than does not have a social responsibility cannot survive for very long.
Academics are not only getting more competitive but also extremely challenging nowadays. In content and curriculum what the earlier generation of students were previously studying in graduate level courses, the same content is finding its way into school rooms. The core subjects may still be the same, but the students today have much wider choices accompanied by a lot more pressure than their parents did.
8/08/2010
Entrepreneurship@school: Giving children the cutting edge biz advantage - India - DNA
via dnaindia.com
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