We’re building the next gen of entrepreneurs, starting now
Future Amp’s Startups and Entrepreneurship Learning Unit features self-paced courses for students to gain knowledge, build skills and explore startup career pathways.
The Australian startup and innovation ecosystem is at a tipping point.
We are punching well above our weight, and the next generation of founders and companies have catapulted us onto a world stage, rocket-fuelling our reputation and economic future.
A recent article on Australia's Top 100 Innovators compiled by David Swan at The Australian alongside a world-class panel of experts, showcases the current superstars of our innovation, startup and investment ecosystem are making serious waves across the world.
In recent years this country has produced a powerful stable of tech companies that are now global category leaders including Airwallex, Atlassian, Afterpay, Canva and Aconex, who collectively employ thousands of Australians and are worth billions of dollars. And we have an impressive hotbed of early stage startups increasingly being supported by a growing Angel investor network.
This is all pretty amazing stuff for Australia, which used to be considered a bit of a backwater of innovation, over-reliant on incumbents and oligopolies and a consumer rather than creator of world-class technologies.
In fact, we now rank seventh in the world for quality and quantity of startups, (according to the third annual Startup Ecosystem Rankings). This has in large part been because of a groundswell of venture capital funding in Australia in recent years, with a record $US1.6 billion (AUD$2 billion) deployed into local startups in 2020, according to KPMG.
But startups need more than just funding to succeed.
Startups do not and cannot exist in a vacuum. They create solutions specific to a time and problem in the market, and are born as parts of a network and system much bigger than themselves. For startups to seed - and ultimately succeed - healthy startup ecosystems are fundamental. They are the ground startups grow in, and they can be the flywheels to a nation’s future, creating jobs, boosting the economy, increasing tax revenue, improving quality of life and urban innovation, attracting and retaining talent and growing local economies.
Startup ecosystems are interconnected and interdependent. Founders need funders, funders need founders, governments need to incentivise startups with policy and regulation changes, and game-changing, innovative ideas can only amount to action and market momentum within a system that’s built to nurture them.
In the current VUCA climate, education provides one of the most important resources for startup ecosystems around the world: talent pool nurturing. Schools, universities, education institutions, industry and online learning providers can play a fundamental role in engaging and upskilling the next generation of entrepreneurs and startup employees by bridging the gap between education and the startup ecosystem, building a pipeline of future founders.
Engaging students in entrepreneurship and emerging industry education early will enable them to build practical entrepreneurship skills, gain real-world knowledge and access the mentorship they need to step into entrepreneurship or startup jobs, regardless of their background, ability or geographic location.
Entrepreneurial thinking can be cultivated
At Future Amp we are reimagining traditional ideas of learning curriculum and career pathways by engaging, equipping and exciting students early in their career exploration and planning journey by providing personalised, on-demand learning anywhere, any time.
The platform helps students to identify career goals aligned with their passions, interests, and strengths, and provides access to 100+ industry mentors, 200+ hours of industry-backed Career Cred skill-based courses, virtual work experience in leading companies, and a World of Work career exploration tool enabling students to access thousands of insights, data points and information about existing and emerging industries.
Startups and entrepreneurship and STEM career pathways into tech and innovation feature prominently in Future Amp’s Australian Curriculum-mapped Learning Areas, with a suite of interactive courses including Entrepreneurial Thinking, Startup Career Pathways, Founder Stories, Business Model Canvas, Rapid Prototyping, Customer Insights, Lean Startup, Venture Capital Career Pathways and Social Entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs are everywhere that education is accessible
At Future Amp, we believe every young person - no matter their circumstance - deserves to have access to knowledge, career pathway choices and skill-building opportunities to give them the best chance of thriving in this newly complex, technology-powered and truly globalised world.
Entrepreneurs can come from anywhere and everywhere. But they’ll have a way better chance of success if they can learn from the hard-won advice of those who’ve started, survived and scaled businesses before. And while no-one can really forecast what work, education, life and travel will look like well beyond the final blip of the coronavirus curve, what is certain is that we have entered a new era as we all shape-shift and upskill to keep pace with rapid step changes in the way we all learn, teach, transit, communicate, cohabitate - and solve problems - in this VUCA world.
There’s never been a better time to start a startup. We just need to make sure we’re building the pipeline of problem-solvers and ripening the ground for the seeds of the next generation of audacious entrepreneurs, right here on Australian soil.
ABOUT US: Future Amp is an industry-backed career education and employability skills platform that helps students plan their future. Using Future Amp’s exploration model, students can identify career goals aligned with their passions, interests and strengths, complete virtual work experience, build real-world industry knowledge, in-demand employability skills, and the confidence they need to successfully transition from education to employment. Future Amp is backed by Amazon Web Services, Future Minds Accelerator, chaired by David Gonski AO, University of Melbourne Innovated and Serp Hills Foundation, alongside global and local industry partners.