College grads should think outside the corporate box
It doesn’t look good for college graduates this year as they prepare to go out and hit the job-searching pavement.
Turns out, students are worried about finding a job. A new survey by career site Vault.com of graduating seniors, found that “44% say they’re very worried about finding employment after graduation, while 42% say they are somewhat worried about getting jobs. Only 14% say they are not worried at all.”
Erik Sorenson, Vault's CEO, says: “It is a tough market out there for new grads right now, especially in the professional services industries such as banking and consulting. The best thing any job seeker can do is to be as well informed as possible about the industry, the company they’re applying to, and the specific skill set required for the job.”
There's another options. They could just say, “to heck with it all” and become entrepreneurs.
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That’s what twenty-something, brother-and-sister entrepreneurs Guy ad Galia Ben-Artzi did.
Guy was working a typical corporate job, and Galia had recently graduated from college when they decided to start a gaming company in 2006.
Today they run a $700,000 online gaming company called Mytopia that provides games such as Bingo and Sudoku for use on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. The industry they operate it is known as the “casual gaming” space, and it allows consumers to play games with other people over the Internet.
“As I watched my peers go through corporate recruiting, put on suits, create resumes and get really stressed out, I started thinking, ‘that’s not what I want to do at all,’” says Galia, about her experience after graduation.
And Guy, who worked for an international tech company for four years, realized, “I stopped being excited by work. I’d come home every day and wouldn’t care what happened at work.”
So the siblings, who had a life-long love of games, decided to start there own venture, and lived off their savings until the company started making money, which surprisingly for the two young entrepreneurs, happened in the first year with sales of $200,000.
The company started out providing mobile games for PDAs and smart phones, but have since migrated to the Internet.
Guy says Mytopia has secured undisclosed funds from Silicon Valley-based angle investors and he expects revenues to increase by 50 percent this year.
As for taking a different road after college, both siblings believe it’s the best decision they ever made.
“This post college time is a fantastic time to take a risk because you have a lack of responsibility,” Galia maintains.
