If you ask any business person who hasn’t started from a business background, they will always give you one golden piece of advice.
No matter what you are pursuing currently, do a business course on the side, whether it is a certification course, a diploma, or a master’s because there will be a time in your life when you will want to pursue business with the skills you have. Having some entrepreneurial training will be the heart of your start-up.
This advice is not just for adults but every parent out there who wants to shape a secure future for their child. Remember, they might not have a single inclination towards business at the moment, but there will be a time when they might wish to.
As a parent, you will be much more secure knowing that you did your part in them being a business person in the later years.
In this excerpt below, we will be discussing how to develop these entrepreneurial skills among children and why they are mandatory.
How To Develop These Skills
Whenever we think entrepreneurial, complicated business lingo comes to our mind. However, the thought process of becoming an entrepreneur is simple. Afterall, one needs the courage to leave their secure job and a certain clarity of vision to use their invested money well.
Entrepreneurship has to do more with soft skills and honing a stellar Emotional Quotient than learning the more complicated jargon.
1. Honing Leadership Skills
The child has to learn that being an entrepreneur doesn’t always mean taking care of what you have built. But also the people who have helped build the empire. Most importantly, the idea of being less selfish and self-centred.
Through certain activities, the teacher can impart the core skills of being a leader and why leaders are not just meant to be authoritative. Skills like empathy, consciousness (wrong and right), and understanding are important for every entrepreneur in a leadership position.
2. Building Inspiration Through Case Study
Case studies are one of the important archived treasures which can motivate students to do something different later in their lives. These stories can be as grand as the business tycoons of our current world, or they can be someone local (say, a teacher who started with nothing but now has made something for themselves).
Plus, these case studies will not only highlight the good parts but also showcase the obstacles and failures they had to overcome. This also helps improve critical thinking as the child starts wondering what they could have done in the same situation.
3. Holding Elevator Pitch Contest In School
Building a strong business itself is a big reward with much fruit to enjoy. In order to give the children a hint of that taste, they should know the power of competition. You can hone some healthy competition between students highly interested in showcasing their entrepreneurial skills.
Elevtaors’s pitch as a concept is interesting. Every team or individual will get two minutes of time (exactly how long an elevator takes to reach zero to the highest point). Within that time period, they have to impress the panel of judges with their business ideas. This opens up doors of creative thinking for many.
4. Problem-Solving Capacity
Every classroom should be a safe place for the child to brandish their creative thinking capabilities. Top schools in Gurgaon are not trying to give children the space to make their own decisions and manage through the consequences of it.
This helps build good problem-solving skills and makes them more inclined to think before making any decision. Analytic thinking is, without a doubt, one of the important skills among entrepreneurs. Not having this skill can later prove to be a problem since many businesses fail due to rash decision-making out of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
To nurture a child’s problem-solving capacity, encourage curiosity and critical thinking. Offer open-ended questions to stimulate their creativity. Provide puzzles, games, and activities that require logic and analysis. Allow them to make decisions independently and learn from failures. Teach the “5 Whys” technique to explore root causes. Foster a growth mindset, emphasising effort and learning from mistakes.
Encourage brainstorming and multiple solutions to challenges which are, again, businesses everywhere are doing. Provide real-world scenarios to apply problem-solving skills. Role model effective problem-solving by talking through your own processes. Praise their efforts and persistence. With consistent practice and support, children develop the confidence and skills to tackle various problems with resilience and ingenuity.
5. Self-Confidence
Building a strong sense of self is important for every entrepreneur, and this is a skill which should begin at a grassroots level. Afterall, navigating one’s journey through any business is not easy, especially as a novice.
Therefore, believing in oneself is one of the basic skills every entrepreneur should have. Schools can help build a positive sense of self through many activities. These would include:
Preventing demeaning talks from children can give children a bad sense of self.
Turning self-doubt into self-confidence by helping them take a task one step at a time.
Helping them build a stronger self-image through positive self-talk.
Through different success stories, teaching them the importance of picking themselves up after a failure again.
Help them understand the difficulty of a realistic business world and how believing in oneself can help overcome that.
What Part Do Schools Play
Schools are the one destination where a child spends almost six hours daily. This is their time of highest mental and academic stimulation. Vis a vis, a place where they learn the most in a span of 24 hours. Therefore, a parent can agree that sending their child to school is a way to help them learn more in a social setting.
Plus, schools today and equipment and access to worldly knowledge can teach a child in a much better and interactive way.
Therefore, if there is a more fitting place for a child to learn entrepreneurial skills from a very young age, it is school. However, one can say that parents can always invest more to send their children to extra classes.
But, it is not about the monetary investment but the child’s mental bandwidth. After being in school and indulging in multiple learning sessions for six hours, they still have to come home and complete their domestic assignments.
After such a vigorous day of mental stimulation, is it really possible for the child to take on entrepreneurial skills?
It would be better for them to learn it at school through separate extra-curricular activities.
Plus, psychologically, children always have an inclination towards activities which are not their core subjects. They find interest in the little break from their co-curricular, and if the teacher is able to make it more exciting, then they learn more. Events like this are a good way to see whether the top school for admission in Gurgaon is worth admitting your child to. These will help you understand how top schools are taking up the teaching challenges of the modern world, seeing that only academic excellence is not enough.
