Evaluating from your audience, customer or potential client perspective can be overlooked all too easily.

How to cope with rejection:
Find someone you can trust to be independent and ask them to evaluate your offering, discover where your holes are and address them. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of ‘it’s-great-because…’

Certainly hold on to that feeling and do some bench testing before you ‘go-live’ with a real, potential customer. Better still ask someone you don’t really class as a supporter; the feedback may surprise you.

Practice makes perfect? maybe; more accurate to say, change becomes less scary the more you experience it, and by default, easier to deal with.

Homework: do one thing each day which scares you; let me know how you get on.

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Unless the economic landscape changes rapidly they are likely to be disappointed when it comes to securing a real ‘graduate job’ at the end of their course.

First some context parameters; what constitutes a graduate job?
1) One which by a quirk of supply over demand employs people who happen to hold a degree?
Alternatively is it
2) A position, for which, a degree is a pre-requisit?

Last year 408,000* undergraduate places were available, in 2009 this number is likely to increase. Graduates will probably find an excess of supply over demand in the coming years. As the motor industry has found to its cost, keep producing when the market isn’t buying equals a glut of unsold stock.

There is a glimmer of hope though, its never been easier to start a business. Technological advances mean tasks once considered complex and expensive, can be completed for a fraction of the cost. Think what an average personal computer or smart phone can achieve. The consumer market is increasingly sophisticated, creating demand for personalised products and services. It needn’t be the case of invention, innovating something that already exists is an excellent way to earn a living and take control of the economic future.

*Fifty thousand students expected to loose out on university places, July 10th 2009 The Times, Joanne Sugden