Lesson  Seven-
Youth Entrepreneurship Strategies

The Strategies Behind Building a Quality Electronic Portfolio Resume

The Strategies for Quickly Establishing Work Experience Through Volunteerism

The Strategies for Effective Marketing of Your Skills and Talents

The Strategies for Finding New Career and Job Possibilities

Finding Jobs Through the Internet

If you can read, write, type, are comfortable with computers, and are willing to learn new things, you're highly employable!  Extensive resources on careers are online as well as job-finding sites that allow free posting of resumes and many sophisticated features. In this lesson you'll receive an overview of what's available. You'll review templates for creating an online resume, and you'll learn about jobs you never knew existed.

New types of jobs are rapidly appearing and the more you explore, the closer you'll be to finding your dream job. In the hands-on activities for this lesson you'll explore many robust job sites offering free resume templates and posting services and much, much more. Monster.com is perhaps the leader, from which you'll get the most complete overview of available services. But, once you've created your resume, you can post it at all the sites.

Volunteerism to Build Skills for Your Resume

The more experience you can put on your resume the more employable you'll be. Consider creating an electronic portfolio web page as an online resume. If you have limited experience - consider volunteering, particularly as an online mentor - to develop and document your online collaboration and mentoring skills. See the outstanding student electronic portfolios from the Mt. Edgecumbe School at http://www.mehs.educ.state.ak.us and related information at http://electronicportfolios.com Make a point to review the sample resumes and resume templates at as many of the job sites as you can so you'll develop a clear idea of what a competitive resume looks like.

Cisco Systems trained 180,000 students in over 84 countries to be network technicians through their Cisco Networking Academy program. But, Cisco doesn't yet offer training for the other 99 percent of us who need training for the community applications these networks make possible. Many community Internet awareness project ideas are detailed below, which you're welcome to use without restriction to win funding for your own community projects. You'll find many doable projects which require no funding, but which can be invaluable to your attempting to establish real work experience for your resumes.

Youth Entrepreneurship Opportunities

Youth today are the technology leaders and technology change agents in our homes and communities. Many youth have created wildly successful online businesses by applying their Internet exploration skills and a good idea. In the web tour for this lesson you'll explore youth entrepreneurship resources and youth-driven community Internet awareness project models.

Instructional Entrepreneurship

As more and more people come online and identify the advantages of quality online instruction, your possibilities for creating a for-profit business delivering quality online instruction, training, and support will increase. Particularly if you're an educator, consider monitoring the rapidly emerging opportunities in both the educational and corporate training worlds. The following two short proposals will give you some ideas to build upon.

Proposal For a New Online Course for Educators

An online graduate level recertification course for educators will be created to bring together the leadership potential of the educational community: administrators, teachers, parents, and students, to identify how education relates to success in the "knowledge age" with emphasis on social entrepreneurship. "Social entrepreneurship" is literally the convergence of education and economic development in the emerging service economy. The sheer numbers of citizens of all ages involved in the educational community suggests strongly that they play a significant role in leading this community education initiative.

The Community Bootstrap Academy project will integrate the following unique online course "Building Learning Communities" for educators. It creates web-based, project-based learning units to be used as models of student activity engaging local citizens in creating a community vision. These activities will include tangible steps forward for designing local web-based content, and collaborative activities, around the theme of "Building a 21^st Century Learning Community". Included are the specific methodologies exploring how Internet resources and collaborative capabilities can be applied to developing both local and global citizenship, service learning projects, and youth Ecommerce entrepreneurship.

Course Description: Learn how to integrate the teaching of citizenship, character education, web-authoring, and Internet skills to engage students with their local community to grow a vision of their collective future. Students will identify for themselves and their community a vision for how people can learn to use the Internet to develop social and economic value. Project-based learning models and extensive existing web-based curriculum will provide students with challenges in developing their Internet self-directed learning skills. Students will use online tutorials to teach themselves how to use digital art, photography, and music for digital story-telling and multimedia presentations to communicate this vision. A student entrepreneurship challenge will focus on those Ecommerce opportunities which can provide local jobs to provide students with the option to avoid relocation upon graduation and to assure their community's future.

This three-semester credit course for educators presents a hands-on review of Internet resources and curriculum templates integrating K-12 character and citizenship education with online collaboration and creating web-based instructional content to grow local community Internet awareness. Growing successful citizens and sustainable communities in the "knowledge age" requires a K-12 leadership role for developing both local and global citizenship by teaching how to create both social and economic value.

Short-term, youth-driven, service-learning project models will be presented for creating local web-based content for their communities showcasing local and regional Ecommerce and entrepreneurial Internet innovations. These projects will help students become involved with their communities' economic development and sustainability issues. Students will learn how to win funding for their community projects from local businesses and organizations.

Educators will learn the easiest methods for creation of web-based instructional content within the context of how to teach students web-based content creation. This content includes essential knowledge worker skills such as self-directed Internet learning and online collaboration. Students will learn how helping others online can lead to instructional entrepreneurship services and businesses. Success as knowledge workers in a global knowledge economy requires a K-12 emphasis on developing the social value of students and requires they become skilled at creating and maintaining meaningful relationships both offline and online.

Whereas in the past the two concepts of the public and private sectors might have appeared to be morally at odds, in the new service economy "social entrepreneurship" is emerging as the synergy of the best of both worlds. Ecommerce entrepreneurship basic concepts will be introduced with the overriding theme of "Information condenses to knowledge, which condenses to wisdom, and VALUE is created in the knowledge age." Introductory online units for use with students will be included as a means of integrating technology standards with writing, reading, and civic studies curriculum.

Online mini-courses designed for teachers to use with their students will provide students with their first, brief, online learning experiences. Students will then create similar brief mini-courses for other students, for which they would then mentor their peers and evaluate the outcomes. Community-building Internet applications have not kept pace with the technology. Under the theme of "Building Learning Communities," students will learn first hand how online collaboration can benefit their communities, while developing their knowledge worker skills in online groupwork and instructional entrepreneurship.

There is an immediate need to bridge the gap between the K-12 goal of creating competent citizens and the students' ability to understand the role the Internet will play, not only in economic development but also in their own future employability. The accelerating pace of change requires students to learn how to think innovatively and how to maintain awareness of successful innovations related to emerging vocational and entrepreneurial opportunities in their communities. The sustainability of communities and society depends on creating motivated lifelong learners, proactive citizens who are value-driven; (character education and service learning), innovative entrepreneurs (using the Internet), skilled collaborators, both offline and online, and citizens who are both consumers and producers, both learners and teachers, all the time.

Self-directed Internet learning skills have become essential. Strategies to make smart personal decisions require that one stays current in a world of accelerating change. Information overload from too much of the wrong kind of information is becoming an increasingly serious problem. Overcoming information overload requires becoming more skilled at being increasingly selective on specific online collaboration skills.

Citizenship education needs to include values development in the form of character education and service learning. A knowledge society and an electronic democracy require educated citizens with skills in both offline and online collaboration and articulation. Internet skills for self-directed learning and web self-publishing are required for competent citizens in a knowledge society. Our educational system needs to develop future citizens' ability to create both social and economic value in a balanced manner. Character Education Web Tour http://lone-eagles.com/chared.htm

Many realistic student-driven community activities will be presented for students to initiate interaction with their community to gather content for local web display. Community awareness will be focused on proven opportunities the Internet represents. Details are available in The Bootstrap Academy http://lone-eagles.com/academy.htm

There are many successful models of project-based learning and student creation of web-based content to benefit the local community which will be reviewed for local use in this unique course for educators. As awareness grows through the use of existing curricular models, educators will learn to use existing templates to begin to create their own innovative curriculum. Moreover, students will also learn to use templates to create instructional experiences for students and adults in the local community. Details are available within: Building Collaborative Capacity – A Web Tour
http://lone-eagles.com/capacity.htm

Project-based Learning Project Directories
http://lone-eagles.com/projects_tour.htm

Project-based Learning Resources
http://lone-eagles.com/pbl.htm

Examples of Successful Youth-Driven Web Content Competitions and Projects:

The International Cyberfair competition, http://www.gsh.org, describes how elementary students create web pages celebrating eight categories of local achievement.

The Community Networkers Youth Initiative http://communitynetworkers.org, students champion the cause of creating online content to benefit the local community

The International Thinkquest Competition, http://www.thinkquest.org, students internationally have created over 4,500 instructional web sites to help others learn online.

The Camp Internet Family-oriented Learning Expeditions, http://www.campinternet.net,  engages families with learning together how the Internet can be used for family programs.

The Global Schoolhouse Projects Directory, http://www.gsh.org , where teachers can post multi-classroom collaborative projects to find international partners.

At Webquest sites, (see http://lone-eagles.com/capacity.htm ) curriculum templates are available for teachers and students to create online project-based learning units, often based on real-world problem-solving.

Entrepreneurship sites and cooperatives for youth and women are listed along with Ecommerce Start-up training resources and sites offering free Ecommerce web sites.
http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks.htm
http://lone-eagles.com/ruraloregon.htm

Mentoring Models, Guides, and Resources
http://lone-eagles.com/mentor.htm

Building Learning Communities Resources
http://lone-eagles.com/teled.htm

Rural Community Empowerment Resources
http://lone-eagles.com/ruralempowerment.htm

More and more communities are investing in Internet at higher and higher speeds. Some clarifications are emerging regarding the real challenges in producing the desired outcomes for which the technology itself presents only the first step.

The ideal community self-empowerment vision is that once the Internet access becomes available, inspired citizens will immediately visualize their opportunities by becoming self-directed lifelong learners, proactive entrepreneurs, and/or innovative skilled collaborators by creating new social and economic value for their communities. The ultimate goal is an educated democracy with citizens producing a balance of local and global contributions, working together to fight information overload, and increasing uncertainty to create a safe, happy, sustainable community.

The goal is for everyone to be motivated and empowered at the highest levels possible. Despite these high-minded goals for increasing certainty and decreasing uncertainty the corresponding potential values, the reality is most communities gravitate to the lower tier of Internet applications. It is becoming dramatically obvious that a more focused approach is needed.

Community projects are needed that can demonstrate in concrete terms how to quick-start the highest levels of community benefits with the least overall costs in time, effort, and prerequisite literacy. Where such model communities don't exist, we need to create them. The resultant storytelling will inspire others to construct their own vision and a real plan for the mobilization of their own community's collective will.

A short-term community project involving educators, students, citizens, and local businesses is proposed with the goal of creating a methodology for initiating ongoing public self-assessment for community Internet empowerment and for producing local online content created by large numbers of local citizens. Many realistic student-driven community activities for students to initiate interaction with their community, to gather content for local web display, and to raise community awareness about the genuine opportunities the Internet represents are detailed at: The Bootstrap Academy http://lone-eagles.com/academy.htm

The following three main themes can be supported in many ways depending on the unique personalities of a particular community. In one community educators and students might be in a position to demonstrate leadership, in another economic developers might create a community learning initiative.

1. Vision: Create appreciation for the power of a shared vision for specific community benefits potentially realized by everyone working together toward the common goal of defining how the Internet can help empower the local community. Articulate online an ideal vision for community Internet empowerment for your community. List online local innovations and stories of current successes, and future possibilities to inspire all who see them.

2. Sharing Resources: Create appreciation for the value of local web posting of carefully selected high value Internet resources by multiple citizens for healthcare, Ecommerce, parents, women, kids, seniors, etc. List replicable innovations and resources from other communities and Internet sources as models to inspire local creativity and validate the potential for your community.

3. Peer Mentoring: Create appreciation for the role Internet can play linking citizens with each other through creation of mentoring and knowledge sharing opportunities both online and offline. List local mentors, and the topics of expertise they offer and create social incentives of recognition for those who share their knowledge with others. Help enlist new mentors by showing them how to gather links to create topical web resources to share with the local community. Create opportunities for people to gather in person to see what others are doing with the Internet. Make the possibilities visible to all.

Hands-on Activities

Within the following resources you will find many exciting resources for learning about new careers, job training, and online resume posting services. Be thorough in your explorations and seek out other similar online resources and keep your own listing of the best-of-the-best.

Monster.com
http://content.monster.com
A Career Center that allows you to market your skills. Free resume posting, services for researching companies, job seeker information, and has a great section on community business.

Freeagent
http://freeagent.com
Tutorials for becoming a free agent information technology professional.

Guru.com
http://guru.com
Resources for marketing your services and finding work contracts.

Hotjobs http://hotjobs.com

Career information, a hotlist of hotlists
http://lone-eagles.com/lksd-careers.htm
Job shadowing, toolkit listings, many master listings with rich job-finding resources.

More at http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks.htm and
http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks2.htm

YoungBiz.com
http://youngbiz.com
Free Ebusiness sites and training for youth!

EBusiness for Teens
http://library.advanced.org/28188
A Thinkquest entry from Jamaica with lots of Ebusiness resources for teens!

Young Entrepreneur's Organization
http://www.yeo.org/ 

Hotlist of Student Entrepreneurial Resources:
http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks2.htm
Wonderful listing of dozens of important resources for student entrepreneurship, home-based businesses, community service, and more!

Youth World Trade Training
http://www.wbe.net   Sponsored by the Reis Foundation http://www.reisfoundation.org  Youth entrepreneurship focus

Adult and Youth Entrepreneurship Training Resources
http://www.emkf.org/ 
The Kauffman Foundation has a billion dollar endowment for funding youth and entrepreneurship programs. To review their free training resources, select Entrepreneurship, then Entrepreneurship resources! Also hosting http://www.entreworld.org , listing extensive resources for entrepreneurs.

Americans Communicating Electronically
http://www.ace.org
A USDA Economic and Development Systems initiative. Links to 4H and other youth programs and related diverse resources from USDA.

The U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office
  http://www.uspto.gov

Invention Submission Corporation
http://www.isc-online.com

A Basic Guide to Entrepreneurship Readiness
http://www.makingajob.com From the Kauffman Foundation

Junior Achievement
http://www.ja.org/newja/index.html
Let their success be your inspiration!

Recommended Readings

The War Against Ignorance
http://lone-eagles.com/hope.htm

2. Email your updated electronic portfolio resume to your instructor with the basic content you think best represents who you are, the best of what you have to offer, and the skills you've developed.

3. Post your resume on at least one of the job sites listed in this lesson and email the web address to your instructor.

Explore Instructional Entrepreneurship markets at http://www.eduventures.com and  http://wrhambrecht.com and http://scnconsulting.htm