In today’s increasingly competitive world, experiential learning has proved to be more and more important in the world of business and entrepreneurship.
That’s why more colleges and universities have started to think about the more hands-on parts of their degrees, offering the opportunity to get stuck in with practical courses that pertain to the practices of the real world.
To explore this world, we have outlined four benefits of experiential learning in business and entrepreneurship that make a case for its implementation in more academic world sectors. Read on below to see what we picked and for more information to decide what course is best for you.
Learn About the World in Practice, Not Theory
Whether you are studying a Product Management degree online or a Master’s in Business Administration at a physical location, practical experiences mean that you actually understand the world as it works in real life.
This gives you a significant advantage over a more traditional academic degree. For example, the former degree could include coming up with your own idea for a product from beginning to end, learning along the way about what could actually work when transferring that into the corporate world. It may go wrong, but you will learn to:
Fail in Practice, Succeed in Real Life
Ask any successful CEO or entrepreneur, and they’ve certainly failed multiple times in their life. It is only through their failures that they have identified the correct road map toward success. In fact, failure is so embedded as a virtue in the start-up world that there is now a FailCon event in San Francisco. By “failing” on a couple of projects while studying for a degree, you will be able to figure out what went wrong and why in a way that a more theoretical degree would fail to grasp. It all means that you will be able to:
Identify Potential Co-Founders and Employees
Teamwork is at the essence of experiential learning. This makes total sense. After all, no one has ever run a successful multinational company all by themselves. You will find out in real-time by working with other classmates on projects what kind of qualities you want to look for in a co-founder or an employee.
Additionally, you may get on so well with one or two of your colleagues that you decide that it makes perfect sense to collaborate with them on a new product idea. Conversely, if you are looking to join a big firm, you will:
Become More Attractive to Employers
Employers love candidates with practical experience.
They want people with a proven track record of getting the work done. With a degree based on experiential learning, you can point to projects that you have done or experiences you had in much the same way you could point to previous employment.
This is what makes degrees with experiential learning such an attractive option, especially at the earlier stages of an entrepreneur or business-minded person’s career.