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Australia needs to step up to the challenge of educating more of our young people with entrepreneurial skills. Currently, we aren’t thinking big enough. Reading through the StartupAus Crossroads 2015 report reveals that we are doing far too little to equip young people with the skills, confidence and opportunities they need to succeed in business. In the U.S., Europe, UK & Singapore, governments and NGO’s are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the entrepreneurial education space. Our friends across the ocean are simply leaps and bounds ahead. And it’s such a shame that we aren’t showing the same faith in our young people, because as a nation we are so very capable of punching above our weight.
But, perhaps I should not be so quick to judge. Over the past 4 years, momentum has started building at all levels of the entrepreneurial education ecosystem. Incubators, accelerators and programs are popping up all over the place. Funding is starting to flow into the sector, and we are starting to celebrate individual stories of young Australians having a crack.
On the data side of things the university sector has managed to have 400 students participate in their respective incubators since 2012. This represents 0.03% of the 1.2 million students currently enrolled at Australian universities. Is this the best we can do?
I really believe we can be doing so much more to accelerate this momentum, and therein lies my discontent with the current progress. Perhaps it’s a naïve youthful optimism, but in my mind I believe we are failing our future entrepreneurs by not setting more aggressive targets of experiential educational program delivery.
At the Foundation for Young Australians we are relentlessly optimistic about the future for young Australians. And a really important part of that future is ensuring that our young people are equipped with everything they need to succeed.
We see young people as job creators and not just job seekers. They are the solution, not the problem, and deserve to be treated as such. So what can Australia do to help catalyse the emergence of Australia’s next generation of Entrepreneurs?
Here’s a 3 step approach that’s currently working & which we need to accelerate:
At the Foundation for Young Australians we are living and breathing this mission. In 2014 we piloted an experiential program called $20 BOSS with 400+ high school students from years 8 to year 9 across Victoria. Each student was lent $20 by NAB with the mission of starting their own business and learning the basic entrepreneurial mindset and skills required to ‘have a go’.
In 2015 we are incredibly excited to be scaling this program to over 20,000 students across the Australia. Programs with this kind of scale are the only way we will ever have significant impact on the numbers of young Australians who think like Entrepreneurs.
As the Changemaker in Residence for the Foundation for Young Australians I have a unique perspective across the nation’s efforts to see where we are lacking and where we are doing well. And I can tell you this, we are missing a golden opportunity to empower more young entrepreneurs than ever before.
Where I see the most need for improvement in entrepreneurial education is for university students. The current methods of delivering education to this demographic are expensive and do not even reach 1% of the target audience. A new educational experience needs to be designed that can be delivered to at least 10% of the university student population every year. That’s the only way we’ll change the current story.
I call on the university sector and government to come together with start-ups, corporates & non-profits to set more ambitious goals around entrepreneurial education that will show young Australians that we do in fact believe in them and that we will back them all the way.
