OUAN602 - Business: Do you have the skills?

The follow up session to the first start up Wednesday was facilitated by Keith Evans. Keith is an experienced practitioner in the Creative Industries in the UK and abroad. The roles he has experience in include Managing Director of CIDACo and Finance Director of Leeds College of Art.

I very much enjoyed the talk by Keith and felt this session was very much complimentary to the first workshop, in terms of the topics discussed were more or less the other side that wasn't covered due to time constraints. One of the more eye opening segments is where we discussed risks, and the risks we had taken. I believe that introducing this idea was quite a good way to make me contemplate the importance of risk taking, in business but also in life - whether in education, work or decision making. Calculated risks are an important part of life and working life as a whole, so this workshop introduced a good representation of this concept for me. It also informed me further about the possibilities of pursuing something that perhaps is less conventional but would work for me post graduation.

This session was also useful to me in the sense that it discussed aspects of 'being your own boss' and self employment in general. More of the financial and legal aspects were discussed here in contrast to the first session which again, was incredibly informative and was good advice coming from a speaker that has worked as a finance director for Leeds College of Art.

The final task to finish the session included each of us writing down a risk we had taken at some point, and where we would rank this particular risk on a scale of one to ten. The purpose of this related back to the idea of calculated risks. I was one of three individuals picked to stand up and discuss the risk we had taken, whatever that was and why we had ranked it where we had. Mine was about decisions I'd made in education and gave it a low score based on the fact that it was well thought out and wasn't a reckless decision but more an informed and calculated risk that has [in my opinion] paid off.