I have spoken across different campuses, seminars, events and podcast about career success and in one of my recent banter about young people lacking work experience at graduation, I recommended that students need to stop seeing themselves as just students while on campus.
Instead, students should launch startups or work in a startup, even if the motivation is not to own a company, the motivation should be to turn ideas into reality.
Starting or working in a startup as a student can increase your career opportunities even if the startup doesn’t succeed ultimately. You will have a lot of valuable experience you can take to any organisation after your graduation.
Startups are temporary organisations looking for a scalable, repeatable and profitable business model. They are not yet a company. They operate to test and validate their ideas or hypotheses about disrupting an industry or how stuff is done.
Almost all companies out there are looking for people with skills and years of experience doing certain things, and you don’t get such experience from the classroom but in doing actual work and turning ideas into reality.
If as a student, you launch a startup or you work in a startup, you will definitely build critical skills and experience in sales, product management, customer engagement, etc. and these are useful skills and experience you can take to any company after your study period in the university.
This is the most efficient cure for “lack of experience” that young graduates always face when they are looking for jobs after school.
Your inexperience today will cost you to make many mistakes that are “not costly” because you are an undergraduate. But by the time you are trying again without the “undergraduate attire”, you are extremely formidable.
If you are an undergraduate and you want to build skills and experience, launch a startup now or work in a startup now. There is no better time to take risks than when you are younger.
It is good for a man that he bear The yoke in his youth – Lamentations 3:27
Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, etc, were all started by young people, most of which were campus projects. None of them planned to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. But today some of these side projects have grown to become full fledged companies. But there are millions of other side projects that never made it to the company status but the people who either launched them or worked in those projects never remained the same in terms of skills and experience.
All you need is the skills and experience that will launch you into bigger career opportunities after school. So, spend your time on campus building things, working with startups or launching startups. Spend time translating ideas into realities. That is what most of the companies you want to work with after school do. So you have to learn how it is done, and learn it earlier in actual projects, not in the classroom!
Launch a startup today. Join a startup today. Start experimenting with those ideas you have by turning them into side projects as a student. Forget about trying to build the next unicorn or a multibillion dollar company. Just focus more about being obsessed with turning ideas into reality.
Ultimately, the ability to turn ideas into reality help you build many skills and experience that will be useful in future.
Afterall, what do you have to lose?
I’m rooting for you,
Great Owete
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