Advices to an unemployed graduate
I was surprised to receive an email from Greece where a student wrote: “As a college graduate but could not find employment, not because of the lack of knowledge and skills, but because my country's economy is in a recession. I cannot wait for the economy to get better as it may take years. Do you have any advice for someone like me to get out of this problem?”
Answer: With the youth unemployment in your country reaching over 35% and the economy is still in serious crisis you should not wait for better time. However, since you are growing up with Information Technology (IT), I think the solution to your problem is also in technology. Have you consider starting your own company using your skills in IT? In a recession, most companies do not want to take risks so they sit idled and wait but it opens up new opportunities for startups to enter and compete. The ability to create your own startup based on local needs is depending on young people like you. Since you have computing skills, you can make a difference by create your own job instead of waiting to get a job with a well established company.
If you read my blogs about entrepreneurship, you probably noticed that the “app economy” did not exist in 2008 when the financial crisis happened. Today with the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, this “app economy” is valued at several billion dollars and supports over 1.2 million jobs worldwide. What lessons could we learned from it? When technical skilled people cannot get jobs, they create ones for themselves. That was what happened in the U.S. during the financial crisis where many young people developed mobile apps and created the “app economy”. You could follow that model by creating an “app economy” for your country.
Today mobile apps supporting personal health are very popular with apps such as diet programs, weight-loss programs, blood-sugar measurement and guides for medical patients. These apps are easy to develop as they can be sold directly to consumers via apps stores or download easily from websites to smartphones. Currently there are over 10,000 mobile medical apps, fitness apps for smartphone and tablets market but most of them are written in English for the English speaking countries. I saw many similar apps written in Hindi for users in India or Chinese for people in China too. From these ideas, you can write similar apps using your own languages and sell them for local use. Please note that you are only using “the ideas” to create your own app so you do not violate any copyright at all. For example there are hundred apps that measures weight gain and suggest certain diets, each has different look and feel with different codes. You could do the same by develop your own mobile apps that way too.
Since most smartphone have good camera, you may want to create mobile app for telemedicine to allow doctors to conduct basic examination, provide advices and support to patients at a distance. It can eliminate travel and wait time in hospitals. You can also create app for telepharmacy where patients can discuss with a pharmacist regarding some medical drug use. You can develop app to remind elderly patients to take their medicine as many of them often forget, the app would call them on a daily basis and remind them to follow their doctor's instruction etc. Basically mobile-health opening up many opportunities to entrepreneurs, from simple apps to complex ones and this market is still growing strong.
Today it is possible to create your own startups with your own innovation using your own skills as information technology is a source of hope for many unemployed college graduates. With so many uncertainties in the global economy, you should depend on your own skills and talents to create new opportunity for yourself and it may begin with starting your own startup.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
