Grooming the nation's future entrepreneurs

SINCE its inception in 2005, the Business School has played an integral role in the country's education system by exposing the nation's youths to the meticulous art of business management.

Seven years on, it has diversified its role from solely being an education provider to playing a major part in producing the country's future entrepreneurs.

While it is clearly up to the students to accept and take on the challenges that come with running a business, it is also the school's prerogative to ensure that these students do become entrepreneurs one day, saysHj Abdul Hj Ishak Hj Idris.

The acting principal of the Business School talks to The Brunei Times about the school's goals and vision for the future.

Does the school plan to increase the number of graduates who will go on to set up their own businesses?

Yes, we do. Of course, at the end of the day we want as many as possible. But the challenges are there, because when the new batch of students begin their studies here, we have to instill interest in doing businesses gradually. We help them figure out what a business is all about, and at the same time we have knowledge training and then we have the business-related activities.

We know at the end of the day it's up to the students ... We can try many ways to help them, to show them the way to run a business.. but at the end of the day it's up to them to deliver.

The main challenge is the seed capital, not only for our students, I think this applies to the public as well.

Do you keep track of how many students or graduates have gone on to set up and manage businesses of their own?

We never really kept track of how many (but) some of the former students have come back to us and informed us that they had started their own businesses... perhaps their businesses are not as established yet but at least they've managed to set it up already.

We do intend to keep track of them however. My deputy is trying to keep track of our former graduates where they are, what are they doing, if they are doing business, what type of business they're doing. We also want to know the statistics.This is important, because to some extent, these (statistics) reflect our achievement too.

What has the school got planned for the future?

At present, we want to introduce the Business School business centre. Its a new project where we have a training programme which will be targetted at students after they graduate. So we want to organise short courses and training modules especially for vocational and technical institutions (VTI) graduates. For those who are interested in starting their own businesses, we can help them in terms of giving them information, training and so on.

In order to do this, we must have our own people to run the facility. In terms of instructors, we already have our own staff. The only thing we need is the space, which we already identified. But then again, the sustainability and viability of all this depends on the response (of the students) and demand.

Previously we had this initiative called Business Incubator Programme, so this will be incorporated into the business centre's training module.

We are looking at probably August to launch the business centre. Actually we've been holding committee meetings with regards to this since last year.

The Brunei Times