Guest Blog on enternships.com
March 18, 2011, 8:19 am
This week’s guest blog is from Will Bentinck, a recent graduate who found himself drawn to social enterprise. Here he explains his story of how he ‘created his own job’ and how his experience as an ‘entern’ inspired and helped him on his journey as a serial social entrepreneur.
I finished my degree last summer and spent several months job hunting and claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA). This is not an experience I recommend, particularly because I grew out of getting an allowance when I was ten. And it’s really boring. I hated it. So, instead of trying to get hired by someone else, I created my own job. The interview was a doddle.
I had quickly got sick of trying to be heard over the cacophony of voices screaming,
“Please give me a job! I am keen to work in a dynamic industry; I have dynamic transferable skills and am a dynamic team player!”
My CV wasn’t perfect (as I kept being told by my very helpful, perfect-CV lawyer friend) and I had to do something worthwhile (I’m not motivated solely by money, much to my surprise); so I set out to do two things: get an internship or three and start my own organisation.
Aside: There is on-going commentary about internships only being for people from wealthier backgrounds because they can afford to work for no money, but you can do internships even when you’re claiming JSA (there are some rules) and it is probably the most effective thing you can do for your career other than sleeping with a CEO. (I’m a CEO by the way.)
So I went to w4mp.org(Work for an MP) and looked at their job listings (I wasn’t clever enough to use enternships.com). I found an internship at a debating website (read that again, it doesn’t say dating website). Debatewise.org aims to create crowd-sourced debates and, among other things, use them to influence policy. I applied, went for interview and quickly started peppering my job hunting with some interning at a desk in Shoreditch. Around the same time, a friend of mine introduced me to an idea in a pub.
“I had this idea…” is a phrase I hear a lot. These ideas usually involve monkeys and occasionally spaceships. This idea was a little more far-fetched. Alex (beardy Glaswegian autodidact) wanted to continue the work of Lord Shaftesbury and rekindle the Ragged Schools, the precursor of state primary education. Except Alex wanted to create the Ragged University.
We’ve all been in a pub or café and found that we’ve learned something from the person we’ve been talking to. The Ragged University’s primary goal is to expand that experience so that one person is passing on their knowledge to a whole room. It gives a platform for communities to educate themselves, it increases social capital (I didn’t know what it meant either), it encourages civic engagement and allows people who would otherwise be distant from education to engage with topics and attitudes they never would have been exposed to. And it’s free.
“That’s a frightfully good idea!” I thought (I’m quite posh) and the idea quickly turned into action – raggeduniversity.com.
If you take anything away from this article other than eye strain, let it be this compound statement: It has never before been easier to start something; it has never before been cheaper to share your ideas with an almost inevitably growing market; it has never before made more sense to take an idea, mix it with some friends and make some entrepreneurial cake.
It’s quite an experience being part of a team of your friends creating, developing, repairing, adjusting, re-launching, publicising and then maintaining an idea that is so much bigger than you originally conceived. I could write for hours about my experiences with the Ragged University, but I will share only one observation here (please write to me if you want to know of any others).
Don’t get too big for your boots, but make sure you wear big boots.
I’ll rephrase that: Implement your idea on a manageable scale, but implement it hard. This is similar to the advice not to bite off more than you can chew, but with the added instruction not to talk with your mouth full.
My internship at Debatewise went well. Debatewise was an entrepreneurial endeavour itself, the brainchild of the brilliant David Crane. His idea got picked up by IDEA, ironically, and after a couple of years of them funding the site, he has now taken over their UK operations; or rather, our UK operations, because he gave me a real job when we became a charity at the beginning of the year. So internships can turn into jobs too – especially internships with start-ups and entrepreneurs (I think they call them enternships).
Blatant plug: IDEA (the International Debate Education Association) UK are hiring enterns right now. We promote informed public debate to help people build more open, participatory societies. There’s a massive revamp of our website going on and we need help with all sorts of things, from code to prose. There’s a job advert on this very site, so sign up immediately!
The Ragged University would have happened without me; IDEA would have a UK branch even if I’d never worked for David; I was just there at the right time and grabbed at those great opportunities. However, the lessons I learned from those experiences (and keep learning) enabled me to substantially contribute to my next project – Levantine Links.
The lawyer friend I mentioned earlier (Ben) went to Syria a couple of summers in a row, to the Syriac Orthodox community in the north east, to teach English and learn Arabic. Ben kept telling me he wanted to set up a recruitment process in the UK to send top graduates out to do the same thing. He kept talking about it. And talking. I kept pushing and pushing him to actually do it and eventually we sat down and started planning.
We achieved more in eight hours that day than I had contributed to the Ragged University in eight months. When we work together, we are astonishingly efficient and productive. I am new to this entrepreneur stuff, I’ve only been at it since last summer, but I am sure that the following lesson will prove to be the most valuable one I ever learn.
Who you work with will define your business, its successes and its failures. So work with people who inspire you with their brilliance, yet acknowledge and defer to your areas of expertise.
If you’re one of those people, I want to work with you; whether that’s at the Ragged University, at IDEA or in Syria. Drop me a line and let’s make some cake.
Enternships.com gives you the opportunity to work with other people and learn how to be better at doing your own thing. While you wait for that world-changing idea to come along, you can intern in brilliant buildings, with passionate people, doing awesome activities.
Let’s make some cake.
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