Top Jobs to Kickstart Your Journey as an Entrepreneur

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• What are the Best Jobs for Aspiring Entrepreneurs?
• Top Jobs to Build Entrepreneurial Skills
• How These Jobs Prepare You for Entrepreneurship 

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Q: What are the best jobs for aspiring entrepreneurs? 

A. The best jobs for aspiring entrepreneurs include roles like sales manager, product manager, business consultant, and marketing manager, which help build essential entrepreneurial skills. 

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In today’s fast-moving market, entrepreneurs are made not just by sheer determination and resilience but also by proper planning and preparation.  

Only practical experience and skill-building can prepare you for the chaos that is today’s highly competitive, dog-eat-dog markets. No individual is ever fully prepared for all the entrepreneurship challenges they will encounter, but there are several jobs that can help kickstart your journey. 

These jobs might be the differentiating factor that keeps you from falling into the pool of businesses that fail within their first, fifth, or tenth year, which is a lot.  

For context, of the private sector businesses started in the U.S. annually, on average, 18% fail within the first year, 50% by the fifth year, and 65% by the tenth year, according to the Chamber of Commerce. More so, of all the businesses started in 2022, 23.2% failed within the first year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

For those that survived, many challenges abound: breaking even, ensuring steady cash flow, creating and running an effective business model, securing funds, effective marketing, getting and retaining good hires, and adapting to market shifts, among others.  

Entrepreneurial careers boost entrepreneurial skill-building positions to learn and develop necessary skills on another person’s time and money while securing funding, insights, and networks that could help kickstart your entrepreneurship. It’s a win-win situation for everybody involved.  

Also, there’s something about working with or for a successful entrepreneur that just inspires people to want to start their own ventures, too. The PayPal Mafia comes to mind, a term that refers to early PayPal employees who went on to start nearly a dozen major tech companies, including LinkedIn, Yelp, Tesla, and YouTube.  

That said, let’s take a look at some of the best entrepreneur jobs worth considering.  

What Are the Best Jobs for Aspiring Entrepreneurs? 

As an aspiring entrepreneur looking to create and manage one or more businesses down the line, you should consider the entrepreneurial careers discussed below, as well as other jobs that fall within their frameworks.  

Sales Manager  

Sales manager is one of the top jobs for aspiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs constantly sell to build and establish their brand image and credibility.  

Selling doesn’t start or stop with attempting to get customers and clients to purchase your products or services. Sometimes, it’s about getting investors, family members, friends, and acquaintances within your network to buy into your entrepreneurial ideas and support them.  

Before Google was established as a business, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had to sell the idea first, and they raised thousands of dollars before they could dive fully into the venture.  

In his early career, Warren Buffet worked as a sales rep for three years in his father’s firm, Buffett-Falk & Company. Even before then, he was engaged in other roles that involved selling.  

As a sales manager, you oversee sales teams and strategies, which helps build leadership and sales skills. The role involves setting goals, motivating team members, and analyzing sales data.  

Other essential skills you may develop include: 

• Sales forecast: The ability to forecast or estimate future sales and set achievable goals.
• Adaptability and problem-solving: You become a good thinker who is able to navigate complex and ever-changing markets to find suitable solutions.
• Negotiation skills: Entrepreneurship will bring you into a lot of situations where you feel like you are being arm-wrestled out of your business or a good deal. Your sales experience can help you confidently negotiate terms that favor you.
• Leadership and team motivation: Serial entrepreneurs succeed because they are able to get their employees and partners to buy into their goals, all with as much enthusiasm that drives them to carry out assigned roles with dedication. 

Other skills include analytical skills, time management, active listening, and customer service.  

Product Manager 

Product manager roles are one of the best jobs for future entrepreneurs who are inching to become technopreneurs.  

This tech-centric job is a marriage of project management, leadership skills, and technical skills. Product managers learn to market and manage products effectively and can apply these experiences to build, market, and manage their own products.  

Kevin Systrom (co-founder of Instagram) and Justin Rosenstein (co-founder of Asana) were both associate product managers at Google before starting their ventures. 

A product manager role will help your entrepreneurial skill-building in the following areas: 

• Data analytics and research: Tech products are outcomes of questions. Questions that attempt to identify needs, bring them to the lab, and dissect them. Data analytics and research skills equip you with how to extract, read, interpret, and apply data properly to make informed decisions.
• Prioritization: As a product manager, you’ll learn to categorize and manage various aspects of product development and management sequentially, accounting for critical tasks that have a huge impact on operations.
• Road mapping: Building on prioritization skills, you’ll learn to create product roadmaps with a comprehensive overview of features, timelines, and goals. This will teach you to strategically break down your projects into smaller goals achievable within shorter timeframes. 

Some other skills you will pick up as a project manager include user-centricity, visualization, forecasting, and measuring, among others.  

Marketing Manager  

Marketing managers are the chief decision-makers for a company’s marketing and branding operations.  

Managing marketing campaigns and teams helps build branding, communication, and strategic planning skills.  

While boosting marketing initiatives to drive sales and promote brands to a broader audience, aspiring entrepreneurs learn practical techniques for promoting their businesses across target markets. Overall, you become better equipped to understand and adapt to consumer needs and preferences. 

As one of the top jobs for future entrepreneurs, marketing management boosts your entrepreneurial skill-building around marketing strategies, creativity, data analysis, budgeting, CMS experience, and advertising skills. 

Once you can leverage these skills to successfully market your employer’s products or services, you’ll feel like you can market yours, too.  

Business Consultant 

No list of top entrepreneurial careers is complete without business consultancy. It is a job that brings you up close and personal with both aspiring entrepreneurs and established entrepreneurs.  

As a business consultant, you will gain insight into various industries and business models, analyzing business operations and providing strategic advice.  

On the one hand, it allows you to push and test your ideas across various industries and businesses, see how they come to fruition or fail, and then pick the necessary lessons.  

On the other hand, it’s an opportunity to have a second-hand startup experience, as you watch startups emerge and be part of their journey for as long as contracts permit. You share in their wins and losses. 

In more ways than one, these scenarios enrich you with so many skills and networks that you’ll be grateful when you embark on your own entrepreneurial journey.  

Such was the case of Gagan Biyani (co-founder of Udemy), Megan Whitman (former CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard), and Kathryn Minshew (co-founder of Daily Muse), who were first consultants before turning entrepreneurs. 

Some key skills you may pick up as a business consultant include:

Other skills include interpersonal communication, collaboration, extensive business knowledge, ability to work under pressure, and commercial awareness, among others. 

Clearly, business consultancy is undoubtedly one of the best jobs for entrepreneurs to kickstart their careers. 

Top Jobs to Build Entrepreneurial Skills 

Sometimes, the best learning starts from the ground up; getting involved in the nitty-gritties and more nuanced aspects of daily business operations.  

Some of the best entrepreneur jobs to consider in this regard include: 

Data Scientist 

Those who rule the data rule the world.  

There is no argument that big data is here to stay, and data management is one of the most important things that drive business intelligence in the modern world. Enterprises must learn to master and govern data with intent, according to Forbes.  

Successful enterprises thrive on data, and their data scientists sit on top of it all, analyzing, handling, and learning the most subtle and obvious parts of large data sets. They are tasked with generating and defining valuable market and consumer insights that steer enterprises. 

Put simply, data scientists are one of the primary engines and cores of enterprises. In their absence, enterprises run blindly or unguided.  

As a data scientist who lives and breathes data, you will develop deep analytical and critical thinking skills, which empower you to make sense of trends and patterns when they are all still foggy to others.  

Moreover, being able to align data analysis with strategic decision-making to drive business success is a surefire way to sharpen your business acumen.  

IT Manager 

An IT manager is a pragmatic planner and organizer charged with overseeing IT infrastructure and operations. From hardware and data centers to software, cloud services, networks, and security systems, an IT manager finds themself at the ground-level and helm of many critical responsibilities. 

These responsibilities, if you can handle them effectively, will inevitably equip you with the project management and technical skills needed to launch and run a tech-driven startup.  

One great thing about IT management is that it gets your hand in every aspect of IT operations.  

This means that as an aspiring entrepreneur diving into the tech market, you would easily grasp concepts and their contexts and implications across data protection, scalability, user experience, product-market-fit, and other areas that easily drive new tech entrepreneurs out of the market.  

Software Developer  

Developing software solutions fosters creativity and problem-solving abilities. It’s a role that also involves working on innovative projects, often in startup environments.  

Away from the business-critical side of things, tech entrepreneurship requires a lot of innovating, creating, and problem-solving. Tech entrepreneurs are always working with market and consumer feedback to rethink and refine processes and create products and updates that enhance customers’ experience. The software developer makes this possible.  

So, it makes sense that as an aspiring tech entrepreneur, you should consider software development in your list of top entrepreneurial careers. 

Some of the top serial tech entrepreneurs you know started as software developers, including but not nearly limited to these two: 

• Bill Gates launched his entrepreneurial experience as a software developer and co-creating the BASIC programming language.
• Jack Dorsey started his entrepreneurial journey as a teenager, first creating taxi-dispatching software before creating the prototype for Twitter much later. 

Software development helps you bring ideas to life, and that’s a very important power to have, irrespective of the direction of your entrepreneurial journey.  

Social Media Management 

Currently, there are about 5.44 billion internet users worldwide. Of this total, 5.07 billion use social media, amounting to 62.6% of the world’s population. The U.S. alone has over 246 million active social media users.  

If there is anything we know about marketing in today’s business landscape, it is that social media is the top marketing channel for B2C marketing. Most B2C enterprises invest heavily in marketing efforts on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.  

Hence, it makes sense that as an aspiring entrepreneur, you should place considerable focus on social media. There are not many better ways to do that than to try your hand at social media management. 

For starters, managing social media strategies and content helps build marketing and communication skills.  

This role involves engaging with audiences and developing a brand presence online. More importantly, it brings you much closer to target consumers; you learn their motivations, expectations, goals, pain points, needs, and more.  

Therefore, if you are leaning towards being a social media manager, you should consider working with businesses within your field/industry of interest.  

This enables you to learn more about your target audience and how to reach them while gathering information that helps you brainstorm and refine your business ideas. 

How These Jobs Prepare You for Entrepreneurship 

Besides the best entrepreneur jobs for aspiring entrepreneurs discussed above, many other jobs could enhance your entrepreneurial skill-building and boost your chances of success at entrepreneurship.  

The jobs include business development manager, financial manager, UX designer, technical director, project manager, etc.  

It is important that you set goals for yourself when taking on any of these jobs. Acknowledge that you have a purpose for going with these entrepreneurial careers: you want to be a successful entrepreneur.  

Hence, it’s important you go for these jobs within your areas/fields of interest and set out the following goals for yourself: 

Financial Stability 

Many business coaches would tell you to keep your full-time job and pursue your passions part-time. This is because it’s often the money from the job that funds your pursuits until you can take them on full-time. An entrepreneurial career can help you secure the financial stability needed to invest in entrepreneurial ventures when ready. 

It might help to first estimate how much you need for your venture, accounting for development, launch, marketing, and initial hiring. This would help you set a savings goal to cover some initial expenses while you seek funding.  

Skill Development 

Entrepreneurial skill-building results from conscious efforts towards learning and acquiring the specific skills you need to achieve strategic entrepreneurial objectives and gain and maintain a competitive edge from the onset of your entrepreneurial journey.  

From leadership, communication, and strategic thinking to technical and operational skills, these entrepreneurial careers will empower you with the skills you need to hit the ground running as an entrepreneur. 

It’s now left to you to, while on the job, take the necessary steps to embrace and dedicate yourself to tasks that help you build these skills.  

Don’t shy away from responsibilities; entrepreneurship involves a lot of doggedness in the face of overwhelming challenges and tasks.  

Networking Opportunities  

Having an entrepreneurial job in your area of interest can help you build extensive networks and connections that you will find relevant and valuable to your success.  

From colleagues and clients to your boss and acquaintances from industry events, you don’t know whose input will make a significant impact on your entrepreneurial journey. As long as there is a mutual interest and connection, keep the bridge strong and clear of issues. 

The PayPal Mafia comes to mind again. Although they all went ahead to create their own entrepreneurial ventures—some of which competed with that of others—they were known to maintain some degree of relationship and exchanged ideas and resources. Even Elon Musk, who was ousted from PayPal, didn’t see it as an opportunity to burn bridges.  

The point is to maximize all the networking and mentorship opportunities that come your way while on the job.  

Industry insights 

Familiar with the phrases “information is key” and “information is the key to success”?  

Well, when it comes to entrepreneurship, both hold true.  

All the risk-taking that entrepreneurs are known for is usually the result of the information they had at hand at the point of decision-making. Often, the information is industry insights and insider information that is not immediately available to the public.  

If you are aspiring to start a restaurant chain, working in different capacities at restaurants will provide you with valuable industry insights you need to kickstart your restaurant ventures with less hassle.  

This applies to aspiring entrepreneurs in other fields.  

Take your time to find the best entrepreneur jobs in your desired industry. Leverage your position to access industry data, trends, insights, and advancements that shape how successful businesses operate in your industry. 

Wrapping Up: Entrepreneur Jobs 

Starting a business and watching it grow into something impactful and successful brings a lot of joy. But success comes at a cost.  

Here, the cost is being patient enough to take a few steps back, work under the guidance of a successful entrepreneur, and pick up some necessary skills and lessons to make your entrepreneurial journey easier.  

Acknowledge that you may not be quite ready to set sail on the trembling seas of entrepreneurship and consider some of the best entrepreneur jobs discussed or mentioned in this article.  

The point is to supercharge your entrepreneurial skill-building, build networks, gather industry insights, save some money, and be battle-ready for all the many challenges that many aspiring entrepreneurs consider daunting.  

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