Being Laid Off Doesn't Mean You're Ready (or Willing) for Entrepeneurship
Saturday, May 15, 2010 at 08:45AM I'm not entirely sure what Washington's Employment Security Department was thinking when it established the Self-Employment Assistance Program (SEAP). According to their website, "you can create a job in an occupation that interests you and stimulate the local economy." Eligible people can get free training and business counseling (as a SCORE counselor and instructor, I've seen this myself) while receiving unemployment benefits.
It sounds good on paper. The state is able to make a goodwill gesture without investing much of anything. All sorts of free and low-cost programs already exist for entrepreneur wanna be's in this area.
But there are a couple of things wrong with this idea. First of all, the impact will be so small that it will have little effect. And free training is great, but once the program is completed, the unemployed worker is on their own. There's little or no access to capital -- the life-blood of a startup. It can also take quite a while to go from learning how to start a business to generating revenue and new jobs, particularly without money as I've said. Finally, just because someone is laid off doesn't mean they're ripe or ready for entrepreneurship (even with training).
So it's not surprising that a recent article in the Puget Sound Business Journal points to the fact that laid-off Microsoft workers have shown little interest in starting their own businesses. According to the article's author Todd Bishop, "Established entrepreneurs who offered assistance to laid-off Microsoft employees say the response has been tepid, at best. And venture capitalists say they haven't been seeing business proposals from workers who were let go." He continues, "...many of the most successful tend to leave on their own rather than being laid off. In that way, one lesson to be drawn from Microsoft's first big layoffs is that it's tough to manufacture the entrepreneurial spirit." So true.
The article, After Microsoft layoffs: A letdown on tech startups by Todd Bishop, appeared in the May 7, 2010, Puget Sound Business Journal.
Reader Comments (1)
I couldn't agree more...