Stop telling unemployed graduates to ‘just start a business’

For over a year, my friend’s son has been waking up to the same unsettling routine: tailor his résumé, modify the cover letter, submit the applications, keep checking for a response, and continue to wait with fading hope. Mind you, the bright young Jamaican has done everything he has been told by society and his nurturing parents to do. He studied hard, earned his engineering degree and graduated ready to help build Jamaica. Yet today he is still unemployed. This energetic, eager and well-trained engineer is one of 21,000 youth estimated to be jobless and locked outside the formal economy. According to STATIN’s latest numbers to June, youth unemployment climbed to 11.7 per cent in April, up from 10.1 per cent a year prior. Young people are now three times more likely than the average Jamaican to be unemployed.

So, his story is not unusual, and neither is the advice he keeps getting: “Why doesn’t he just start a business?”

Let me declare my bias. As an entrepreneur, I have spent nearly 20 years training upcoming entrepreneurs, designing entrepreneurship programmes and writing about small business. I’m deeply passionate about this field. Therefore, it may surprise you to hear me say this unapologetically: stop telling unemployed graduates to start a business. Yes, entrepreneurship can be a powerful path, but it is not a parachute or catch all. The tendency to prescribe it as the cure or antidote for graduate unemployment is like telling a drowning man to build a boat.