Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

I read this fascinating post by Charlie O’Donnell titled In this economy, we’re all entrepreneurs.

This is a must read post for all students, recent graduates, and job seekers. We have always been taught to seek out for jobs after we graduate from schools. No one tells us to start a company right after the school. We’ll be fortunate if we get surrounded by people during our graduate studies who promote entrepreneurship. Either it’s because of less awareness about entrepreneurship or clear visibility about what to do, we generally don’t take the startup route right after the school. Most of us follow the corporate job route. It’s certainly not a bad option if that corporate opportunity is challenging and lucrative one.

But this economy and recession do not leave many challenging and lucrative job opportunities for recent graduates or job seekers. And that’s when Charlie’s advice come into picture -

The whole recruiting process is built around the idea of matching–that there are enough openings to digest everyone into the workforce and its just a matter of matching the right people to the right positions.

Well, what if there are no openings come this May–literally none. No job postings. No on-campus interviews. No job fairs. This isn’t a fantasy. It’s happening right now. Even the companies that are showing up to job fairs aren’t hiring–they’re just there for branding. Let’s not even talk about the number of people getting laid off everyday.

You know what that makes all these students and everyone else out there in the job market…

…besides screwed?

Entrepreneurs.

That’s when you have a product–yourself–that you are solely responsible for. You have to discover, target, and pitch your prospects to survive. It’s like a new market where there aren’t any established sales channels and you’ve got to convince your first customer that spending money with you will bear both immediate and future benefit.

This is a fascinating advice. Why do we have to wait for the big corporations to offer us a job? It’s good to have that as a one of the options, but we should not completely depend on it. Especially in this economy, irrespective of job opening from big corporations, we should keep brainstorming, exploring and experimenting our own ideas and business opportunities. We need to create our own brand. We need to create our own future. We should stop getting worried about this economy and financial crisis. Our thinking bandwidth better be invested in creating next ideas, products and services. So happy starting up!