INFORMATION HIGHWAY: Assessing Your Skills, Education, and Experience

Assessing Your Skills, Education, and Experience

Your skills, education, and experience will provide you with tools that will help you to

decide if you should start your own business.

The first step in your assessment is to make an honest appraisal of your personal skills

and education. You should list everything, especially if you are unsure what type of

business in which you want to become involved. Don't list any faults or doubts here. This

is a place to remember all of the things that you know how to do well.

After you have identified your personal skills and education, focus on your business

knowledge. If you know what you are interested in, list what you know about the field or

industry. If you are well versed, simply outline the general areas. If you are not sure, you

should list everything. Concentrate on specific business information rather than general

life experience. All experience will be useful, but we can only use the business experience

when we are making a decision about what skills you may need to develop in order to run

your business.

The next step is to evaluate your decision making abilities. When you own your business,

you are in charge, and many decisions will have to be made based on what you think. Not

all of these decisions will have to be made immediately, but some of them will have to. If

your normal response is to give problem solving to someone else, then you will probably

have difficulty with running a business. Reflect on your life experiences. Write down two

situations where you solved a problem and the decision you made worked well. Then

write down two situations where the decisions you made did not work so well. Be sure to

write down what you learned from these situations.

Last, identify your entrepreneurial skills. Successful entrepreneurs have a lot of initiative

and also take risks, and they have learned from making their own mistakes. Taking a clear

look at your source of motivation and your belief in yourself will help you to be prepared

for the challenges that come with owning your own business. Probably the three most

important factors on the road to Success are: the ability to be flexible, the willingness to

change with the market as technology advances, and the ability to trust yourself. If you

have all of these, you are about halfway there. The rest is:

• What do you feel are your main strengths?

• What do you feel are your more serious weaknesses?

• How do you think someone else might answer the above two questions about you?

• What talents do you possess and in what situations have you used them?

• How would you personally define the idea of having a job or being employed?

Business Start-Up, Where To Begin & How To Grow

INFORMATION HIGHWAY