Can Core Entrepreneurial Skills Be Learned?

There can be no doubt that the entrepreneurial skills list required for success is endless, but are there skills you need to be a business owner that you simply can't learn? Many people are already familiar with the core skills required to be a profitable business owner, but people don’t always talk about the skills that can’t be taught or learned. Today’s discussion will be dedicated to the skills required to succeed as a business owner, and whether it is possible to acquire them.

Personal Characteristics That Help Any Entrepreneur Succeed

As an entrepreneur, there are some qualities that you need that you simply can’t learn in a classroom or even on the job. However, these aren't so much skills as they are personal characteristics, and typically only people who have these qualities already would consider becoming their own bosses anyway. Among the most important assets you need to operate your own business are resilience and perseverance, because it takes between three to five years for a business to truly establish itself. Other important qualities you need to run your own business include:

• Passion and enthusiasm
• elf-motivation
• Risk-taking
• Vision
• Optimism
• Ability to take initiative

Integral Entrepreneurial Skills and Characteristics You Can Learn

Aside from those qualities, all the other successful entrepreneurial skills can be learned either in school, from a mentor, or through good old fashioned hard work and experience. Take, for instance, the skill of decision-making. You could say that being decisive is a personal trait that you can’t really learn, but that’s not entirely true. People can become more decisive by building confidence, and the ability to make wise and calculated decisions comes with experience. Here are some other learn able skills that define good entrepreneurs:

• The ability to learn from your mistakes
• Communication and people skills, including listening skills and leadership, which can be developed through practice and exposure
• The ability to make goals and develop strategic plans to achieve them
• Sales and negotiation, which are directly linked to your communication skills
• Knowing how to conduct market research and to analyze data
• Critical thinking and problem solving

Curious to find out how you measure up? Try an online entrepreneurial skills test to see how many of these qualities and skills you already have, and which ones you could learn through experience as your own boss.

Setting Yourself Up for Success

Being any type of entrepreneur demands most of these skills. However, there are entrepreneurial ventures you can pursue wherein success is easier to achieve, not because it’s simpler, but because a great deal of the groundwork has already been laid. For instance, consider a digital marketing franchise with a company that’s been in the business for over 20 years already, and that has had time to build an international reputation and a global network of partners.

When you take on a franchising opportunity like that, you eliminate the need for some of the qualities that many other entrepreneurs otherwise need, namely the risk-taking. WSI is a proven brand with a successful business model already in place, and the low start-up and overhead rates combine to make a digital marketing franchise a reliable, stable, and steady career opportunity.

The entrepreneurial skills that you can learn versus the ones you can’t seem to follow the same logic as Thomas Edison’s philosophy about success: it’s 90 percent perspiration (hard work) and 10 percent inspiration (innate abilities). Being an entrepreneur is hard but rewarding work, and it seems that if you already have the personal characteristics required to succeed, then you can learn all of the other skills along the way.

Find out if you have all that is required to be your won boss. Take our self-assessment test right away!