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Entrepreneurs and Education
January 26th, 2011 by StephenPosted in Blogroll |
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Attention Entrepreneurs: Education Courses Can Help You Succeed
Entrepreneurs and small business owners who don’t want to spend time and money on an entrepreneurship degree program have the opportunity to take individual entrepreneurship classes. The Kauffman Foundation reports that nearly 3,000 schools provide entrepreneurship classes. Look for courses taught by instructors who have actually been successful entrepreneurs or small business owners. You can also learn from the successes and failures of other students who are willing to share their experiences.
Free Online Entrepreneur Classes
Some colleges and universities offer free online entrepreneur courses, including Capilano College, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Open University, and UC Berkeley.
Highly Ranked Schools
Fortune Small Business (FSB) offers specialized lists of the best colleges for entrepreneurs. Colleges are selected based on months of interviews with hundreds of entrepreneurs, professors, students, alumni, university administrators, and venture capitalists. The interviewees were asked which programs they thought were the most innovative and effective and why. Here are the schools ranked the highest (in alphabetical order): Boston University, Grand Canyon University, University of Houston at Victoria, University of Wyoming, and Western Carolina University. Some colleges and universities allow students to just take the classes they’re interested in.
The University of Arizona’s top-ranked McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship provides three non-credit entrepreneurship courses. The McGuire Center has been given a #2 nationwide ranking by Entrepreneur/Princeton Review, so you know the courses are of the highest quality. The excellent instructors will teach you how to start a small business or grow your current business. Another benefit from the program is the fine mentoring offered by McGuire Center staff members. (It should be noted the author has no connection to the university.)
Social Media for Entrepreneurs
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are effective tools that entrepreneurs and small business owners can use to reach prospective customers. Even those with experience using social media for business purposes can benefit from taking some courses. Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said, “Often our perception of social media, and what we can and can’t do using social media, is very much tinted by what we think our favorite person is doing - and our favorite person in usually ourselves. So it is about getting students to understand that the empirical skills are absolutely necessary, because whatever they think is intuitively correct, is probably about themselves, but nobody else.”
Social media courses are available online. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers its New Media Literacies courses for free on the Web. The courses cover blogging, podcasting, wikis, and more. They include thorough lecture notes and slides for reference.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or if you’re looking for ways to be more successful in your current business, consider taking some courses in entrepreneurship.
Brian Jenkins, a writer for BrainTrack since 2008, contributes content about many topics related to college degrees, including those in entrepreneurship.
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