Self-employment

Enterprise skills for career development

If you want to set up your own business then enterprise skills are clearly going to be helpful - you need to be able to think creatively and innovatively, solve problems that arise and be proactive in order to manage your business.

But are enterprise skills useful for employees too? The answer is yes, absolutely! In fact we are increasingly recognising that enterprise skills are highly valued by many employers. There is even a word - 'intrapreneurship' to mean behaving like an entrepreneur while working as an employee.

Not only do employers value enterprise skills, but these skills can also be useful to help you manage and grow your career. Think about the skills we listed at the top of this page: creative thinking, problem solving and being proactive. These are all very useful when it comes to job searching and career development. There is some suggestion from recent research that taking an 'enterprising approach' to your career development is particularly important if you are based in a very small community – such as, for example, one of the island communities. In many smaller communities jobs are ‘created’ by individuals and organisations who have identified a gap and then who proactively fill it.

Further help on developing an entrepreneurial skills is available from the Scottish Institute for Enterprise and the university's Enterprise centres: the Centre for Enterprise in Perth and the CREATE centre in Inverness.