Job Opportunities for People With Entrepreneurship Degrees

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When you tell someone you have an entrepreneurship degree, they tend to assume you’re going to start your own business. And you may very well do that – at some point in your career. But not everyone with a degree in entrepreneurship wants to launch a business straight out of school. Many first seek to take advantage of their degrees working for other businesses.

Happily, an entrepreneurship degree can prepare you to do just that. This article takes a look at the four different types of entrepreneurs as well as the best entrepreneur jobs that require these skills.

What Is the Entrepreneurial Skillset?

An entrepreneur is someone who builds or operates their own business, which makes the term synonymous for someone who’s willing to take on a great deal of risk. Beyond optimism and fortitude, people who succeed as entrepreneurs tend to be skilled communicators and salespeople, which helps allow them to marshal others and get them to buy into their vision.

Entrepreneurs also tend to work well with others. They understand and are comfortable with different types of business strategies and welcome innovative thinking. Most of all, they are lifelong learners – open to others’ ideas and able to draw lessons from their failures as well as their successes.

This is precisely the sort of skillset that many companies look for when hiring for leadership positions. They recognize that people with entrepreneurship degrees will have spent a great deal of time learning and honing these abilities.

The Four Different Types of Entrepreneurs

There are many different types of entrepreneurs, but they can all be grouped into four general categories:

1. Small-business entrepreneur: A small-business entrepreneur is usually thought of as the “classic” entrepreneur – someone who has an idea for a product or service and brings it to market by starting a business from the ground up.
2. Scalable startup entrepreneur: A scalable startup entrepreneur might have similar passions to the small-business entrepreneur, but the product or service that this businessperson brings to market can be readily duplicated at minimal cost. This makes for a business model that has the potential to grow very quickly. A good example is an entrepreneur who develops an app and then markets it using the software-as-a-service model. Scalable startups are good candidates for venture capital investment.
3. Social entrepreneur: Social entrepreneurs are distinguished by their desire to provide a product or service that has social or cultural value and can have a positive impact on society. They may tend to gravitate toward nonprofit organizations.
4. Corporate entrepreneur: Corporate entrepreneurs – sometimes called intrapreneurs – are sought by large companies looking to introduce a new product line or service to remain competitive and/or increase their market share. They often do this by launching a new division or subsidiary, and need people with entrepreneurial know-how to lead it. Some of the best entrepreneur jobs for people with entrepreneurship degrees may come from this category.

The Types of Jobs You Can Get with an Entrepreneurship Degree

When looking for entrepreneurship jobs, there are numerous types of jobs for which people with entrepreneurship degrees are qualified. Corporate entrepreneurial positions with above-average salaries tend to fall into four major groups.

[Entrepreneurs] are lifelong learners – open to others’ ideas and able to draw lessons from their failures as well as their successes. 

Middle-Management Positions

At big companies, C-level executives develop the business plans but it is the mid-level managers who put those plans into action. Graduates with entrepreneurial degrees may be ideally suited for this role, especially when it involves marketing a new product line or entering a new line of business. This is what these degree holders have trained for – except that they can draw on the resources of a large organization instead of a startup’s shoestring budget.

Advertising and Marketing Jobs for Entrepreneurs  

Whether the position involves advertising and public relations to generate interest in a product or marketing duties to help roll it out, what these jobs have in common is that they require the ability to identify a market need and then win over others to a vision of how that need can be best fulfilled. Entrepreneurial degree holders can be ideal to play these roles.

Sales Jobs for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is worth little without the ability to sell others on a new concept, product, or service. That is the foremost skill in the entrepreneurial toolkit, so it is one that people with entrepreneurship degrees may have spent a lot of time developing. Large corporations know this and can place graduates with entrepreneurship degrees in a wide assortment of sales roles. Sales managers, for instance, set the organization’s sales goals, determine price points, and assign sales quotas. Entrepreneurship graduates have the perfect training for this.

Finance and Purchasing Manager Jobs for Entrepreneurs

Financial analysts help companies make profitable decisions, while purchasing managers (also known as supply managers) oversee the acquisition of the goods, services, and equipment that their company needs to do business. People in these roles can often predict business outcomes by studying economic trends, examining the company’s financial records and assessing the risks associated with financial and purchase decisions. People with entrepreneurship degrees have backgrounds in these areas, and the experience they gain performing these functions for a large enterprise or corporate startup helps to prepare them to start their own venture, should they choose to do so later in their careers.

There are many other jobs that can be well-suited to graduates with entrepreneurship degrees that fall outside the corporate domain. Some examples include management consultants, not-for-profit fundraisers, job recruiters, and business reporters. All of these require the knowledge of business operations and people skills that entrepreneurship degree holders have learned.

Starting a Business as an Entrepreneur

As this article demonstrates, entrepreneurship graduates who aren’t ready to start their own businesses can have many other options to choose from. There are a great many well-paying jobs for which entrepreneurship degree holders are well suited. Plus, when the time does come to go out on your own, the network of colleagues you’ve cultivated in the corporate world can become an invaluable resource. It can even be a potential source for new clients – as long as you tread carefully.

A version of this article was originally published on May 26, 2011.

Photo: Getty Images

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