My wife and I were in a similar situation when we graduated college - she had a degree in agriculture development and I had a degree in information systems. Back in 1999, we couldn't have had two farther apart career paths - agriculture in small towns and technology in the major cities.
Instead, we decided to create our own jobs and blend our skills together. The result was several agriculture software programs that have been sold in over 55 countries. This business has been our main source of income for the last 10 years and allowed us both to work from home and raise our family.
Living near College Station, TX (home of Texas A&M University), I volunteer to work with students often and am seeing more and more students that want a financially rewarding and satisfying career while maintaining a lifestyle balance. In many cases, entrepreneurship offers the best chance of achieving this goal as you are in a position to decide which opportunities you pursue and which you pass.
Today it's primarily my wife (support & some marketing) and me (development & marketing) running the business and we have two home-based support reps. Our main product is a cattle software program that lets ranchers keep track of their cattle including information such as breeding, calving, purchases & sales, medical treatments, pedigree/lineage, etc. Once they have recorded this information, it helps them make management decisions so they can be more profitable. Our website is at http://www.CattleMax.com.
A rancher once attempted to hire me to develop a replacement for CattleMax. He wanted to pay me the cost of a CattleMax install. You are safe from competition (from me).
Slate has a weekly segment on the New York Time's bogus trend of the week (http://www.slate.com/id/2259817/). Not 100% sure that this is the case, but this article didn't really ring true to me for two reasons:
1) All of my friends majoring in engineering or CS or anything tech are already deciding between multiple job offers all over the country. AFAI can tell there is a huge shortage of qualified candidates for tech positions; at least companies are recruiting heavily at my somewhat well known state school. I have talked to friends in other disciplines and it is definitely harder for them- but they are usually the ones much less interested in entrepreneurship as well.
2) While I see a much higher level of enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in general, I really don't see any higher level of students taking the plunge and actually doing it. Most people (like me) are deciding that given the high cost of college and their lack of savings/debt the prudent thing is to save as much as possible by working. Again- those who are considering entrepreneurship tend to be tech students with job offers they are turning down, not turning to as a last resort.
In short, the recession seems to either be ending, or just not particularly relevant for people with tech degrees, and I would obviously love there to be a ton more students diving into entrepreneurship when they graduate, but I think the trend is overstated in the media.
There are lots of opportunities for non-tech people to be entrepreneurial online. The internet's made it much easier to sell products and services at virtually no cost, it doesn't matter if your a designer or a drop-shipper, the tech is mostly prebuilt and out there for you to just use.
As tech entrepreneurs we should be figuring out what's stopping non-tech entrepreneurs starting their own business in their area of expertise/passion and figuring out how to build the tech that will enable them to do so !
I agree. When I read this, it felt a bit fake. While I plan on doing something entrepreneurial after college (June 2011), most of my classmates aren't built for it. I've traveled in developing countries by myself, started small ventures (mostly failed), ran student clubs, studied entrepreneurship in bschool, read a ton of businessy books etc. I've been building up to this for a while. Not that you need any of this necessarily, but I suspect it makes me somewhat more ready for the shitty parts of starting a business.
Most of my classmates (in psychology) would not be able to pull off a venture very easily with so little org or tech experience at 21-22.
The article cited a study which showed a good quantity of people getting job offers but decided not to take them.
I think the thing with this years graduates is that they heard the CS class of 09' got job offers of $50k and they feel satisfied with their $60k, not knowing graduates in '08 were getting 80k. People in the top 5% with CS degrees are always going to have jobs. But the real question is, are you getting paid a lot less for the same amount of effort?
This behavior harks back to an older time when people similarly had little choice but to start their own businesses or work freelance. For the past 50-100 years, in urban areas being independent or an entrepreneur has looked like a lifestyle choice given how many jobs were available, but now it's become a necessity again, just like it used to be. I'm not sure this is a bad thing at all.
I didn't particularly like the way this article covered the topic, but it's probably just sour grapes because I wasn't included in it. I did exactly what they're talking about, so here's my story on how it happened and how long it has taken to actually be a suitable replacement for a job.
I graduated in December '05 (a semester early) from an Ivy League school with a degree in Industrial and Labor Relations. I had interned in HR for two summers with a company that I was really excited about. Because of relationships I developed there, I had multiple job offers, even though I didn't go through the on campus recruiting process. Fortunately, during my internships, I realized that HR wasn't for me (I'm sure the HN community can understand that). After committing most of my college years towards pursing a career in HR, I felt a little lost when I decided that I wanted to something—anything—else. I felt a pull towards entrepreneurship, but I didn't even know the startup world existed when I graduated.
So, I took a contract job for a few months while I stayed on campus for the Spring semester. Then I moved back in with my parents and took some time off to "think." And some more time off. And then a little more. (I also had a girlfriend who was still in school, which played a part in my unwillingness to commit to a job. We're still together, so I'm happy with my decision to ) When I finally started searching for a job, I realized that I didn't really want one. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I had no idea, no experience, and no clue of what was possible. So I looked for jobs that might prepare me for entrepreneurship in the future.
From December of '06 to May of '07 I committed myself to searching for jobs, while I also spent time learning about industries that interested me. I landed a decent number of interviews, but nobody wanted to hire me. I think that they could smell my bad attitude, and they also figured that someone with a résumé as good as mine but still on the job market after a year must have something seriously wrong with him. I was in a rut, my girlfriend and parents were losing patience with me, and I was extremely unhappy. I just wanted to be a productive part of society.
I had wasted most of what I had going for me when I graduated, so I decided that the only way that I could "get it back" was to start my own business. Luckily, by May of '07 I had been job searching long enough to know how broken the job search process is for grads who didn't have a clear idea of what career path they wanted to pursue.
After learning about Woot.com, I came up with the idea of one job a day, and I took things from there. I learned everything that I could about online recruitment, and I started building my site and my business. I had built websites in the past, but I pretty much had to start over. My parents were still supporting me to some extent, but I decided that I'd only use my own savings. The idea of taking money from someone else to start my business seemed ridiculous to me.
Oddly enough, I landed an interview with a startup in the job search space just as I was starting my company. I was surprised to learn that CEO would be interviewing me, and he didn't seem to like it when I told him that I was in the process of building a startup in the same space. (I needed to tell him something about how I spent the previous year.) He kind of got angry at me, and I obviously didn't get the job. Three and a half years later, his company's ad platform is one of my main revenue sources.
So, I started One Day, One Job - http://www.onedayonejob.com - in late May of '07 and launched it in November of '07. I had to bail on the idea of selling daily job postings, and I instead decided to write about them from an editorial standpoint. It was the only way that I could build an audience without selling aggressively with nothing to sell.
After two years the company was "profitable." Three and half years in, I'm finally making enough money to cover all of my personal expenses. If things keep up, next year should be great. I get calls from VCs occasionally, and I've had multiple acquisition offers. More importantly, I've reached hundreds of thousands of college students and helped quite a few of them do what I couldn't—land an exciting job straight out of college.
I made a lot of friends who were doing the same thing along the way. Most of them failed and eventually used their experience to land a full-time job. I stuck things out, and it's finally starting to pay off. I couldn't have done it without a supportive girlfriend and family—I guess they're my "investors."
To make a long story short, I'm a graduate who made his own job. The added twist is that my job is helping other people with their job search. Maybe that makes me like the people who make money teaching people how to make money. I often get called a "job search expert," but I'm really just an entrepreneur who uses the lessons he's learned from starting a business to teach job seekers how to improve their approach.
I wouldn't say that creating your own job is as much of a trend as the Times makes it out to be, but there are people like me who have made it work. Missing out on a salary for 3 years is really hard, even if you know deep down that the equity you're building is valuable. The quickest return on investment is in the form of experience. Even after a year of running my business, I knew that if I quit I could have jumped into much better job opportunities than I could have right after I graduated.
I'd certainly recommend creating your own job to any graduate who isn't happy with his or her options, but I'd also make it clear that it can take a long time to make it work—and for many it never does.
Instead, we decided to create our own jobs and blend our skills together. The result was several agriculture software programs that have been sold in over 55 countries. This business has been our main source of income for the last 10 years and allowed us both to work from home and raise our family.
Living near College Station, TX (home of Texas A&M University), I volunteer to work with students often and am seeing more and more students that want a financially rewarding and satisfying career while maintaining a lifestyle balance. In many cases, entrepreneurship offers the best chance of achieving this goal as you are in a position to decide which opportunities you pursue and which you pass.