Spotlight On Entrepreneurial Skills Part 2

Last month’s DataBrief pointed out a widespread entrepreneurial skills gap among arts alumni from various backgrounds: relatively few alumni indicate that their institution helped them acquire or develop entrepreneurial skills, yet most claim that entrepreneurial skills are important to perform effectively in their profession or work life.

Alumni call for educational institutions to pay closer attention to developing students’ entrepreneurial skills. However, there is a need to unpack what is meant by ​“entrepreneurial skills” because the term encompasses a wider set of skills, such as idea development, leadership, and opportunity recognition. The upcoming SNAAP Career Skills and Entrepreneurship module (available to institutions participating in SNAAP or SNAAP+ in 2015) will help us understand how graduates develop, deploy, and understand these skills in varying ways.

It remains to be seen all the ways in which graduates use entrepreneurial skills and for what purposes, but existing SNAAP data enable us to analyze one especially visible and key application of entrepreneurial skills: the founding of a company. Who deploys their entrepreneurial skills to found non- or for-profit organizations? Are there notable differences among graduates by major or demographic characteristics?

In contrast, the variation by demographic characteristics is somewhat unexpected, as depicted in Table 2:

Starting with the 2015 survey, SNAAP institutions can select a module on Career Skills and Entrepreneurship to append to the core survey. Participating institutions can become better equipped to understand and address differences in alumni needs, by major and by demographic characteristics, in their efforts to prepare all graduates for work life. 

This month’s DataBrief was written by Alexandre Frenette, Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Creative Work.