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Find Your Passion and Become an Entrepreneur

January 4, 2023 / Leave a comment

Everyone has something they are passionate about doing. It could be anything from graphic design to cooking. Finding your passion is the first step towards becoming an entrepreneur, but it’s not always easy to find your true passions. Here are some tips to help you identify what makes you passionate and turn that into a successful business.

Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash

Do Your Research
Before you can even begin to think about becoming an entrepreneur, you need to do some research. What kind of businesses are out there? What type of companies and services do people need or want? Spend some time researching the market, reading up on industry trends, and getting a feel for what kind of business would be the most successful in your area.

Find Your Niche
Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to find your niche. Think about what sets you apart from other entrepreneurs in your field and how you can use that to your advantage. Do you have a unique skill or experience that can set you apart from the competition? Are there any specific products or services that only you can offer? Identifying your niche will help make sure that your business stands out from the crowd and gives customers a reason to choose you over someone else.

Make Connections
Networking is essential when it comes to being an entrepreneur. You need to make connections with other entrepreneurs in order to grow and succeed in business. Reach out to mentors who can provide guidance and advice based on their own experiences as entrepreneurs. Make sure that you also connect with potential customers so that they know who you are and what products or services you offer. Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are great tools for connecting with fellow entrepreneurs as well as potential clients.

Conclusion
Finding your passion is just one step towards becoming an entrepreneur but it’s an important one! Take some time to reflect on what makes you passionate and how that could translate into a successful business venture. Once you’ve identified what sets yourself apart from other entrepreneurs, start researching potential niches, making connections with mentors and potential customers, and get ready for success! With hard work, dedication, and determination anyone can become an entrepreneur—all it takes is finding something that inspires passion within them!

Come study & practice entrepreneurship at BMCC

10 Essential Job Skills You Gain As An Online Student

As you earn your degree and decide to study some classes online, you acquire some of the most sought-after skills in today’s job market.

Saint_Leo_University_OnlineThere’s a significant benefit to pursuing your college degree and taking some classes online that may surprise you.

Sure, you probably chose BMCC for its reputation, flexibility and convenience – so that you could continue to work, and take care of parts of your life.

What you probably did not realize when you enrolled, however, is that a degree program with some online classes helps you strengthen fundamental job skills that employers, regardless of industry, seek in today’s job applicants. These are essential skills such as communication, teamwork and time management that hiring organizations are having a hard time finding even in otherwise qualified candidates.

Data supports demand for soft skills

Burning Glass Technologies, a leader in job market analytics, recently analyzed millions of job postings across the United States and identified 28 foundational, non-specialized skills that are requested by employers across industries. In addition to listing the skills, the report includes data about how difficult these skills are to find in the job market. “Employers appear to face real skill gaps in finding the baseline skills they need,” it states.

BMCC Business Management Deputy Chairperson, Dr. Shane Snipes, explains that soft skills such as communication, critical thinking, problem solving, and time management are fundamentals needed in any industry, at any given time in history, “in order to allow the technology of the time to be utilized to its fullest.” Companies today want you to know how have online meetings, share materials online, and much more.

And online students, he says, have an advantage when it comes to developing these skills.

“Online education puts the ownership of education into the hands of the student much more than a traditional classroom. Students must become self-starters in soft skill areas in order to succeed.”

Adaptability indispensable

“Since there is no more predictability in business – or employment, for that matter,” Snipes says, he believes that adaptability is the most important soft skill the contemporary workplace demands.

And who understands adaptability – and the need to shift gears as circumstances change unpredictably – better than a busy working adult enrolled in an online degree program?

Adaptability means changing old behaviors and embracing new ideas and ways of doing things. It means learning new digital tools for conducting online research or collaborating with other students.

That’s just for starters. Here are 10 additional skills that are in short supply in today’s labor market that you develop as an online student…

1. Communication skills

Without the face-to-face time with other students and professors that naturally occurs in on-ground classes, online students work hard to effectively communicate digitally, share information in nontraditional ways, listen and read carefully, and respond specifically and succinctly.


2. Organizational skills

For online students, organization is a way of life imperative to managing multiple assignments, courses and deadlines, in addition to work and family responsibilities. These students realize that organization is a mindset and a habit that enables them to focus on short-term goals.


3. Writing skills

Online courses are writing intensive, giving students the opportunity to strengthen critical writing skills every academic term. Since online students communicate extensively via email and online discussion boards, they gain an understanding of the nuances of digital communication, a critical asset in a today’s workplace.


4. Ability to meet deadlines

Online degree programs are not self-paced: courses include assignments with weekly deadlines. Similar to traditional semesters, online academic terms are not open ended; they have start dates, end dates and final exams. Successful online students must know how to meet deadlines.


5. Computer skills

Basic technical literacy is essential for just about any position in any industry. Clearly, since online students can navigate the online environment, they have foundational computer skills necessary for the job market. Working with other students and professors via videoconferencing, webinars, online discussion boards and other online communication and collaboration tools prepares online students for today’s technology-driven work environment.


6. Teamwork

One of the misconceptions about online learning is that students are isolated. Group projects are often part of the curriculum requiring students to leverage each other’s strengths as well as compromise and adapt to accommodate each other’s schedules and priorities.


7. Time management

There’s an old saying that if you want something done to ask a busy person. People with a lot on their plates know they must manage their time. Online students know how to make effective use of short blocks of time (like waiting in the car to pick up your child from school) to accomplish small tasks and how to save long blocks of time for more complex tasks.


8. Self Starter

Online education puts more responsibility on the student. Online students must take charge of their own learning, staying on top of assignments without the structure of a traditional classroom to guide them. Self-motivation is the hallmark of successful online students.


9. Research skills

By learning about traditional and non-traditional resources, how to identify and state a problem clearly and concisely, and how to go beyond simple Google searches and use advanced featuers when digging for information, online students develop strong research skills that prepare them for the workforce.


10. Problem-solving skills

The responsibilities associated with the multiple hats every online student wears – student, parent, employer, spouse, son or daughter – create challenges both large and small with daily opportunity to apply problem-solving skills. Two of those skills, in particular, resiliency and perseverance, define adult online students.

Demonstrating soft skills

From writing to research, teamwork to organizational skills, with each academic term you complete, you strengthen skills that are in demand across every occupation. The key is to be able to demonstrate these skills on your resume, in a cover letter or in a job interview.

For example, asked to describe your ability to meet deadlines under pressure?

Explain how you completed a research paper while studying for final exams and tending to an ill parent or child.

Need to give an example of teamwork?

Describe how you learned to collaborate with other online students across time zones and work schedules on group projects.

“I think soft skills are so hard to find because the last 20-30 years of socialization and communication have changed more quickly and more dramatically than any other time in history,” says Snipes. “And now we are experiencing the biggest divide ever in the workplace.”

But it’s a divide that you, as a graduate of an online degree program, will be able to bridge.

STEM to STEAM to STEAME: Science to Art to Entrepreneurship

July 23, 2019 / Leave a comment

Without question, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is the new buzzword for those worried about post-graduation employment. These are all disciplines in which students could excel if they are to retain their industrial and economic strength through a lifetime of work.

In his February 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama urged that we double-down on science and technology education starting in our secondary schools. To give the argument even more traction, some would widen the list of STEM professions to include educators, technicians, managers, social scientists, and health care professionals. Indeed, the talk these days in my college is about how to engage the 50%+ who study liberal arts in the 2-year programs.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the STEM job sector is growing at twice the rate of non-STEM occupations, but we should note some caveats. First, let’s remember that STEM workers, as identified by the Commerce Department, comprise only 5.5% of the workforce. Second, while STEM workers overall may earn 26% more than their counterparts, the greatest differential is seen in the lowest-level jobs; the higher the terminal degree, the less the earnings difference.1

Why Art & Entrepreneurship

Therefore, we have to bring students into the power of their mindset. In particular, the entrepreneurial way of seeing problems and solutions. It’s not just thinking outside the box, it’s thinking of practical solutions that solve quickly and innovatively the problem. Many businesses do not have months and month or year to solve problems.

Take Stephen Northcutt, a 4-year college grad, who is now the president and CEO of The Escal Institute of Advanced Technologies. Before he began working in computer security, before he even went to college, Stephen was a Navy helicopter rescue crewman. Later, he became a whitewater raft guide, a chef, an instructor in the martial arts, a cartographer, and a network designer. Stephen came to college to study geology, but then he became intrigued by geodetics, or global mapping. His real strength, it turns out, was not in the technical arena. As one of Stephen’s professors said, “Stephen’s real strong point was being able to examine the situation and know what to do.” This means he had an entrepreneurial mind.

STEM is AI & STEAME is Humanity

When we add art and business, we immediately complicate basic machine learning. The brain is an amazing adaptive instrument that can make music, art, and expand on physics. Going into the increasingly technical world of work requires that integrate art and entrepreneurship into our educations system so that we can simple and clever solutions to complex problem. And of course complex solutions to complex problems. But heavens not—complex solutions to simple problems (bad tech can do that too).

When we focus in on STEM+AE, we can marry what our minds do best with the dynamic and intriguing work-world.

Moreover, it is not a given that the only path to STEM job success is to attain a STEM degree. About one-third of college-educated workers in STEM professions do not hold degrees in STEM. Two-thirds of people holding STEM undergraduate degrees work in non-STEM jobs. One-fifth of math majors, for instance, end up working in education.2  Nearly 40% of STEM managers hold non-STEM degrees.3  This data points to one of the realities of college and career: the workplace is flexible, vibrant, and often unpredictable—a moving target, if you will. It is a place where, over a lifetime, a college graduate will hold multiple jobs and may even see multiple careers.4 An entrepreneurially minded person in that job market will be able to adapt more quickly.

Numerous biographies of technology executives illustrate that even in the tech fields, the rise to the top is facilitated by non-tech degrees. A study of technology company startups by researchers at Harvard and Duke found that 47% of their CEOs and CTOs had terminal degrees in STEM subjects, but 53% had degrees in a variety of other fields—including finance, arts and humanities, business, law, and health care.5

Moreover, the CEOs of Dell, JP Morgan Chase, Walt Disney, IBM, and FedEx all have liberal arts educations.6

Why is this? We think it’s because the people who run things—whether divisions, departments, companies, or state governments—are integrators and synthesizer—and entrepreneurs.

So who brings together the scientists, the engineers, the designers, and humanists? I think you know by now what I believe. Not every one of our graduates will go on to be a Steve Jobs, but we know that they will be bigger, broader, and more creative and fearless thinkers and doers. That’s what community colleges need most.

Fun Video about STEAM…