There are many roles to a successful career as an entrepreneur. In fact, several successful business men and women have never even received a college degree; they simply had a brilliant idea that they were able to follow through on.
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However, those who would like to get a solid educational foundation to inform their success have a few good options. This leaves many students wondering, what’s the best degree for becoming an entrepreneur? Here are some of the best degrees to pursue before starting an entrepreneurial path.
Business Degree
A business degree is the obvious choice for most entrepreneurs. A business degree deals with many aspects of being an entrepreneur. It teaches the student how to communicate effectively, how to see and provide for needs in the market, and how to find and pursue opportunities. Business degree programs touch on aspects of finance, psychology, and other relevant fields. While a business bachelor’s degree can be somewhat vague on each topic, an MBA forces students to delve deeply into the issues and develop their skill set. Many people are dead set on choosing a business degree or MBA before becoming an entrepreneur because it gives such a wellounded preparation. However, those who want to learn more deeply about a single side of entrepreneurship might choose a different degree program, such as the ones below.
Marketing
A marketing degree or another creative degree could definitely be helpful for a budding entrepreneur. Since so much of becoming successful as an entrepreneur depends on the way you present yourself, creative students have a leg up on the competition. Entrepreneurs with marketing degrees are able to promote their products and services more effectively, and they will gain more attention from the start than some of their other cohorts. Since there are so many budding entrepreneurs these days, there are plenty of good ideas that go unnoticed. When marketing or arts students package their ideas effectively, they are able to gain recognition quickly.
Psychology
A big part of becoming a successful entrepreneur is understanding people. For this reason, a psychology degree could come in handy for a hopeful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur encounters many people each day, including clients, potential partners, employees, and others that he or she must work with. An entrepreneur needs to be persuasive and comvince others to follow his or her ideas. An entrepreneur must also win people over; the path to success is much shorter when others are looking after you and actively trying to help you. For this reason, psychology degrees can be helpful. Courses in decision making, personality psychology, and business or industrial psychology may be particularly helpful. You may especially want to choose a degree program in industrial/organizational psychology; this field offers entrepreneurs a good amount of insight into how to run and organize an effective business model with all of the human complications that occur.
Finance
Money is obviously an important part of an entrepreneur’s life. There is no one to account for an entrepreneur’s financial success except for himself or herself. When an entrepreneur is savvy about managing the finances of a project, cutting corners where necessary, and expanding the budget in areas that have proved profitable, the business can go much further. For this reason, those who are great at analyzing numbers and patterns are successful entrepreneurs. A degree in finance can help you master this aspect of running a project. While this degree may miss some of the other important aspects of becoming an entrepreneur, it certainly gives you a solid background in handling one of the more notoriously tricky aspects of creating entrepreneurial success.
Communications
A degree in communications is an excellent choice for an entrepreneur. The nature of this work demands that you communicate effectively with people from all walks of life. Since you will be the one coming up with the big ideas, you won’t be able to convey these effectively to others unless you have the necessary aptitude for communication. Getting others on the same page as you will be key in making sure your project develops in the direction that you want it to go. Specific skills that you may gain in a communications degree program include public speaking, negotiation, reconciling miscommunications, and the effective use of various communication platforms including social media.
IT Degrees
With an ever increasing reliance on computers to get our work done, an entrepreneur with an IT degree will be ahead of the game. Many of the most profitable and successful new business ideas revolve around the technology industry, so an individual with a strong background in computing and IT will have an advantage in coming up with useful new services and products. There are plenty of internet tools and technologies that can make the life of an entrepreneur easier, from social networking platforms to accounting software. An entrepreneur with a strong IT background can best take advantage of these technologies to make life easier. Aside from this, an IT degree is one of the most solid degrees to fall back on in case an entrepreneurial idea doesn’t work out.
There is no right answer when it comes to choosing a degree for entrepreneurial work. Aspects of many disciplines are helpful to entrepreneurs, and the variety of the work is specifically what appeals to many aspiring entrepreneurs. The choices of degrees above will allow you to develop on the path to becoming an entrepreneur, but they are by no means the only solutions. For more examples of how to apply various degrees to an entrepreneurial role, visit the following site: http://teach.ceoblognation.com/2013/01/31/best-degrees-for-entrepreneurs-answers/