Page 131 - guidance-supporting-europe-s-aspiring-entrepreneurs-policy-and-practice-to-harness-future-potential

Guidance supporting Europe’s aspiring entrepreneurs
Policy and practice to harness future potential

CHAPTER 5
Guidance support for career management of

aspiring and new entrepreneurs

An entrepreneur is usually thought of as someone who is responsive to change,
who sees opportunities that others may not see, and who takes risks to mobilise
resources to make new opportunities happen. Academic literature on
entrepreneurship shows that entrepreneurs often display similar personality traits:
they are risk takers, they like being in control, they need to achieve, they are
ambitious and they are ‘creative’ (Envick and Langford, 2000; Llewelly and
Wilson, 2003). Such characteristics have contributed to entrepreneurs being
described as a ‘certain kind of person’ (Llewelly and Wilson, 2003).
This view of entrepreneurs implies that entrepreneurial people are born,
rather than ‘made’ (Akola and Heinonen, 2006). However, literature and practical
experience suggest that entrepreneurship can be taught, and that a creative
environment encourages entrepreneurial thinking. They also suggest that
guidance and education for entrepreneurship can stimulate the interest, skills and
confidence of people to take a business idea forward.
Each individual entrepreneur has unique skills, competences, strengths,
weaknesses, and wishes and aspirations. The development of career
management skills can help entrepreneurs to survive and succeed in a

challenging/changing business world. Specifically, the assumption is that career
management skills can:
• enhance self-awareness and awareness of the changing world of work; self-
observation helps to monitor personal and business progress;
• help entrepreneurs to identify their strengths and weaknesses in relation to
managing people or a business;
• improve the ability to take responsibility for their own career and personal
development;
• strengthen the ability to manage the relationship between work, business and
learning throughout all stages of life;
• help to assess when there is a need to seek external advice or expertise to
carry out a certain business transaction or overcome a specific problem during
the set up phase;
• identify where entrepreneurs can find and access further training to improve
their skills in specific areas.

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