9 Professional Development Resources for Entrepreneurs
Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: What are some of your favorite professional/career development resources for entrepreneurs? From books and websites to conferences and groups, we want it all. Feel free to think outside of the box: If there’s an action movie, beat-’em-up video game, or other unlikely source that you think entrepreneurs can learn from, let us know!
1. Deskbright
Deskbright is an online learning platform for business and technology skills. Our mission is to empower employees, freelancers, and entrepreneurs to thrive at work. The platform contains tutorials on a number of critical business skills. Most notably, it contains a number of tips and tricks to help you expedite and automate your work through advanced Microsoft Excel functions. Entrepreneurs can leverage our tutorials and templates to cut down their workloads through the power of spreadsheets in their day-to-day business operations.
I always get inspired by entrepreneur movies and documentaries such as Something Ventured and the Pirates of Silicone Valley. A great resource to start with is this IMDB list.
As CEO of a startup, I know that I’m constantly on the go and always looking for ways to consume valuable content. That’s why I started The Business, Life, and Coffee podcast. The podcast has even gained a few notable accolades. The Boston College Carroll School of Management called it one of the ten “must-listen podcasts for MBAs.”
Each episode is like having coffee with a subject matter expert in a different arena, and the interviews are short enough to enjoy as you sip a cup of coffee, but long enough to have depth.
I enjoyed Traction by Gino Wickman. Traction gives you a road map to making sure you have the right people in the right seats and to making sure you are taking the business in the right direction. It also gives you systems to help assign and track goals at all levels of the organization.
Subscribe to the Youtube channel for The #AskGaryVee Show, which is hosted by serial entrepreneur and best-selling author Gary Vaynerchuk. I’ve learned so much from that show in the past six months. Sometimes people are asking the exact questions that I have!
One of the major sources for personal, professional, business, and career growth for entrepreneurs is SlideShare. SlideShare offers visual content and information from experts around the globe and is a great medium for on-demand learning and growth.
For entrepreneur who are always looking for ways to expand their business and enhance their personal growth, the medium of SlideShare allows access to out-of-the-box content and ideas.
Project management skills are a true lifesaver when it comes to running a business, and one amazing action movie that provides an illustration of project management in action is Ocean’s Eleven. With George Clooney serving as the project manager, the movie’s heist plot effectively runs through the project management process from defining the project, to getting stakeholder buy-in, to forming the team, to execution, to post-project evaluation. The lessons learned can easily be applied the projects in your business.
I joined Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) in 2012; since then, EO has become my single most valuable resource. This group allows entrepreneurs to offer and receive peer-to-peer feedback in a safe forum setting. I often attend EO learning events, where I have access to big-name entrepreneurs who have already been through the scenarios I face. EO also offers access to educational programs at places like MIT, the London School of Business and Finance, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Being part of EO is invaluable because of how much it offers. It has given me a place to further my education, network with peers, and learn new business tools and tactics, ‹all through one outlet.
At trade conventions, people will inspire you to go do something with the information you’ve obtained, and it really gives you the energy and motivation to become a better professional. You’ll get you a lot of in-depth information in a short amount of time, making the learning curve very intense. After one of these conventions, I am usually armed with enough new information to last me through the whole year.
