Career accelerator Startup Institute Managing Director Andrew Hoag asks if career accelerators could provide the solution to the startup skills gap in his post at VentureVillage. Hoag writes that talent is essential for any startup to succeed. Absent the people with the right skills, the lifeblood of startups, such as those in Berlin where a McKinsey study estimates 100,000 jobs will be created by 2020 because of these young companies, will wither dry.
Hoag writes, "Talent is key for startup success - arguably even more important than money - and if there's one thing that keeps founders awake at night, it's the worry that they won't be able to find the right employees and get them motivated as quickly as possible."
In his talks with founders and venture capitalists in Berlin, Hoag said the concern exists that the city's pool of talent is already drying up. Conventional business schools and universities are not producing the right talent to enable Berlin's founders to grow their operations. They may give students the chance to grow intellectually and become independent but they don't really equip students to deal with workplaces in the real world, particularly in the innovation economy that is rapidly-growing, Hoag wrote.
The MBA, too, may prepare managers for careers in large companies but it does not teach agile thinking, initiative and the willingness to fail, skills which are necessary in the startup world, he wrote.
Career accelerators are new educational programs that seek to address talent problem faced by startups. Following the traditional accelerator model, educational accelerators incubate people in order to produce individuals with a "trifecta of technical skills, cultural acumen, and relationships to hit the ground running at a startup." It provides training by offering programs that focus on fields like web development and product design as well as in business areas like sales and digital marketing, Hoag wrote.
Hoag said that career accelerators like the Startup Institute aims to "help address the startup skills gap by providing a pipeline of talent to fuel the capital's startup economy for years to come."
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