Hungry 'Generation Z' are an entrepreneurial breed

Sep 2 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

Today's students are adapting their thinking and developing their skills to deal with the uncertain world they now face when they graduate. If they can’t find a job, more say they are prepared to take the plunge and set up their own business. Karen Dent reports.

UNDERGRADUATES are becoming an increasingly entrepreneurial bunch to cope with the current global reality where a good degree from a good university no longer guarantees a good job upon graduation.

BT has just cancelled its graduate recruitment scheme and other large corporates have cut back on the number of university leavers they are taking on as recession forces them to tighten the purse strings.

Enterprise skills are now recognised as a vital part of young people’s armoury, according to feedback from Durham University students who took part in research into attitudes towards entrepreneurship.

As well as being more likely to start up their own businesses, today’s students and graduates consider entrepreneurial skills to be important assets when seeking employment in the corporate world.

More than 2,000 undergraduates took part in the project carried out by the university’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, which found that students believed university was the right place to develop these essential skills and attitudes.

A strong focus on achieving, a desire to see things through and an imaginative use of knowledge emerged as the top-three traits that students thought would help them to succeed. But despite strong university support in teaching these skills, there is still plenty to do to equip undergraduates with the abilities that the business world wants – especially in the current climate.

Graduates who have left Durham are now “absolutely shocked they are unemployed”, according Dinah Bennett, director of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, who presented the report at the House of Lords earlier in the summer with Prof Allan Gibb OBE, the university’s Emeritus Professor of small business and entrepreneurship.

She said: “You go to a good university and get a good degree, you expect to get a good job. But 48 people are going for one job. They are seeing it all around them. They are seeing, feeling and experiencing that.”

The media focus on the difficulties graduates currently face finding jobs, coupled with a generation brought up on a diet of enterprise education at school and a reality TV schedule where entrepreneurship is the new rock ‘n’ roll, has rammed the message home.

“They are not a blank sheet. There was a great expectation they wanted entrepreneurial education,” Ms Bennett said.

“A lot of them now have role models of people who are entrepreneurial. Around 47% had a family member who was running a business. Also a lot of them tell us their favourite programmes are The Apprentice or Dragons’ Den – students are really hooked on that.”

Dubbed ‘Generation Z’, the current crop of undergraduates are prepared to use this grounding to start their own business if they are unable to find the right job Around 17% of those quizzed saw themselves becoming self-employed or starting their own enterprises after they graduated.

The research discovered that Generation Z – young people now coming through the system who have benefited from the Government’s £60m a year spend on enterprise education since 2005 – had different motivations to Generation Y which came before. Innovative, creative and flexible are among the key terms associated with this new generation, which is also not afraid to ask for the support it needs to succeed.

Durham University is now responding to demand from students for help in setting up businesses while they are still studying, by setting up undergraduate venture creation programmes to provide guidance.

Although the university’s Business School has a strong reputation for encouraging student enterprise, Ms Bennett says the new challenge – and demand – is for entrepreneurial skill building across all parts of the institution.

“It’s recognising that entrepreneurial skills is not just setting up your own business, you can be entrepreneurial in the corporate sense,” she said.

“It really is embedding this and ramping it up across the university - staff as well as students. Staff are realising they must be more enterprising in their research teaching and must spot opportunities to bring money in.

“Generation Z – they are hungry to create something new. They are creating their own future. It’s just how we adapt to this.

“The switched-on students are grasping the nettle and taking advantage of these opportunities.”

Page 2: Case Study: Entrust