My buddy Patrick Dwyer Merrill Lynch financial advisor and Miami resident believes that the school education system should be shaped in a far more flexible way in terms of teaching business and entrepreneurialism. Patrick has been in finance his whole life and he is massively passionate about passing knowledge on to the next generation. Patrick wants his children to get better opportunities than he had and this is why he believes that we should be tailoring our education system to support young business minds. I believe that Patrick has a point with this and I know that my own children would benefit greatly from this type of teaching, let’s have a look at what can be done.
Current Business
Currently we are teaching business in schools across the country but in the main these topics are directed towards learning about other businesses and how they operate, rather than how your own business may function. Kids learn about competition, different intellectual property rights and the Boston Matrix, but they don’t learn about how the tax system works for small businesses, how to drive a hard bargain with suppliers or how to go about hiring the best staff. Kids should be learning about companies but they should do so from a standpoint of owning your own business.
Reason For Change
Year on year there are more businesses being set up than ever before, this means stiff competition and a challenging path to find success. Unfortunately as more businesses are being created, the number of businesses which fail is rising and less than half of those new businesses will fail before the 5 year mark. Patrick believes that we have to ask ourselves why these businesses are failing, is the market against them? Are their products inferior? Competition too stiff? Regardless of whether one or all three of these issues is the reason, we can help these individuals by giving them a better education. We can teach students how to beat competition or retain market share, we cam show them how to spot and avoid negative market trends and we can show them how to ensure that a product is fit for the market. Better education will result in higher levels of business success.
A La Mode
Entrepreneurialism is very much on the rise and it is widely considered to be a cool career choice. The education system has a responsibility to these young men and women to match their ambitions with appropriate teaching, helping to shape their futures as an entrepreneur. Some may point at successful entrepreneurs who didn’t do well at school or who weren’t given the right education, but it is important to remember that these are very much exceptions to the rule. For every entrepreneur who made it with a poor education, there may be 3 or 4 who were left wanting because of the lack of inspiration and knowledge which their school provided them with.
Where do you stand on the issue? Let us know in the comments below.
