Could entrepreneurs be the answer to student career success?

In the world which GenM operates in, entrepreneurs (like you) are essential to student career success. On the face of it, business pioneers and budding students seem like an entirely different species. However, if you look closer you may find that they’re walking very similar paths. Both are growing, learning, and building upon their knowledge with the ultimate goal of landing exactly where they planned: a successful future where goals have been met and optimal growth has been achieved. A startup is seeking to find its industry footing and plant its roots in the same way that a student is seeking to find their career placement and settle in. The interesting part of this is that they can actually help each other to do so.

As the marketing lead at a higher learning platform, I see this connection in action every day.

Student marketers come to our platform in order to learn and develop their skills in digital marketing. They start through gamified lessons as part of their certification training. A key element of this training is working remotely within businesses to apply their knowledge and learn from a mentor for three months. Their learning is accelerated while in their apprenticeship — everything they’ve been taught in the GenM curriculum can be applied within the businesses that they’re helping. In this way, learners are able to build skills in many categories of digital marketing at the same time: social media management, email campaigns, content creation, SEO, ad campaigns, and so on. While doing this, they receive active feedback from the business they’re working with and gain valuable career direction. We’ve found that making work experience a mandatory element of certification is sending a stronger breed of marketers into the work force.

A startup is seeking to find its industry footing and plant its roots in the same way that a student is seeking to find their career placement and settle in. The most interesting part of this is that they can actually help each other to do so.

At the same time a startup, small business, or entrepreneurial endeavour can get help in checking marketing tasks off of their to-do list. All of the items that seem to pile up, big or small, can be tackled by their student marketer for a three month period. For many companies in the early stages of development, a little extra help can go a long way. Their GenM apprentice can work with them, remotely, at various skill-building tasks during a fixed amount of time each week. By the end of the apprenticeship, this has an incredible win-win effect. For the student marketer, they’ve achieved their digital marketing certification and new work credentials to boost their resume. For the business, they’ve been able to grow and move forward in a lean, productive way.

The Takeaway

The most important takeaway here for you, the entrepreneur and startup, is that you have a lot to offer student marketers. They also have more to offer your endeavour than you might initially think. We believe that entrepreneurs are the key to student career success so much that we’ve built an entire platform around connecting the two. The very best part is that GenM has made it easy for you to explore hundreds of remote student marketers, chat with them, and ultimately onboard them with a one-click labor contract. You can pay it forward and help a student advance their career while growing your business at the same time.

We’d like to hear your thoughts on the relationship between entrepreneurs and student career success — feel free to leave a comment, we’re happy to create a dialogue to further explore our findings.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 377,923 people.

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