Can you imagine how the human race would have managed life had it not been for technology during the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s evident that technology saved us during the pandemic by helping us to stay connected with what we normally do daily while staying at home safely with our families and loved ones.
During the same time, techno entrepreneurship took flight as many were making a living via online businesses. As the world adapts to post-pandemic, we are witnessing the boom of two key areas of expertise, namely, tech and entrepreneurship.
However, this now presents us with two significant questions to ponder:
- How do we bridge the gap between tech expertise and entrepreneurship?
- How can we maximise the use of available technologies to our benefit?
Today, innovation lies in how technology can be used to solve real-world problems, thereby helping businesses and societies thrive. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionised our daily lives, resulting in a surge of our younger generation opting for degrees in the field of computer science, thereby allowing them to branch off to other disciplines (e.g., finance and business) should they decide to pursue a postgraduate degree later.
Moreover, employers of today are more interested in fresh graduates’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills and not solely on their CGPA score. Being able to incorporate technology, especially AI tools, makes a potential employee more employable. This is in high demand by employers in today’s ever-evolving competitive job market, which focuses on tech coupled with a strong entrepreneurial mindset.
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For these reasons, my colleagues and I at the University of Nottingham Malaysia strongly emphasise the importance of discipline in education. Two successful examples are the famous Nottingham Advantage Award and a newly introduced initiative called Leadership for Community Enterprise Programme, which is based on the highly successful Ingenuity Programme in Nottingham, UK.
These programmes aim to develop transferable entrepreneurship and leadership skillsets among our students, therefore supplementing what they learn in their respective undergraduate programmes. For those who have a strong computing background, this subsequently enriches them with traits to become a successful technopreneur.
With technopreneurship being an enticing career path in the current digital age, stakeholders such as educators, employers and government play a vital role in developing and harnessing these tech talents. All three stakeholders are intertwined, and educators need to re-design curricula based on the current market demands. This serves to better equip graduates with the know-how and skillsets which will allow them to thrive within new job opportunities that are currently emerging in the industry.
Career prospects that await technopreneurs range from supporting diverse industries such as finance, business, consultancy, education, healthcare, computing, and social media. In addition, graduates should be mindful that aside from being an entrepreneur and tech-savvy, the emerging trend to ensure success in this field is to be forward thinkers, financially prudent and, most importantly, able to adapt to change.
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