Portfolio Project: Skills for International Entrepreneurship

This portfolio project explores the essential skills and attributes required for a successful career in international entrepreneurship. The student identifies the importance of people management, cultural and emotional intelligence, time management, and decision-making skills. The project emphasizes the interdependence of personal and professional development, highlighting how qualities like empathy, resilience, and patience contribute to both aspects of life. The student discusses the need for continuous self-improvement through vocational courses and communication training, recognizing the impact of professional development on personal growth. The project concludes by emphasizing the importance of analytical and decision-making skills developed through professional experiences, which ultimately enhance personal decision-making and contribute to a more balanced and confident approach to life.

Running head: PORTFOLIO PROJECT
Portfolio Project
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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1. Identify and evaluate the skills and attributes you need to manage both the personal
and professional elements of your life effectively.
I intend to build a career as an international entrepreneur. An international
entrepreneurship is a relatively new career path. The importance of entrepreneurship has risen
since the past decades. The increasing number of SMEs shows that more and more people are
choosing this career path (Hui and Gerber 2017). Technological inventions and potential
market in the foreign countries are creating the opportunities for the career path that I have
chosen, i.e. international entrepreneurship. An international entrepreneurship helps in the
growth of a business and creation of value through innovation and tapping new markets in the
overseas countries.
In order to become successful in my career I would need both professional and
personal abilities that will help me in managing the situations that might arise in my early
years. The first skill that I need to develop is managing people. People management skills are
extremely necessary for entrepreneurs. It includes team management, leadership, choosing
right people for the right job, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each employee
and motivating the employees (Barba-Sánchez and Atienza-Sahuquillo 2018). Through my
people management skills I will be able to manage the teams that I work with. Team work
has become an integral part of international organizations as it instills an environment of
cooperation and support.
Leadership abilities will help me to create a better culture in the organization. I want
to be a flexible and fair leader. Besides that I also want to inspire new ideas from people and
run organizations through innovation. This is why I believe that my leadership style will be
most similar to transformational leadership that allows individuals to work as per their own
way while inspiring them to work better. Choosing right people according to the job allows

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smooth running of the organization (Akhmetshin et al. 2019). People get the chance to
enhance their skills and test new boundaries. Motivation capabilities are also part of
leadership. This ability will allow me to inspire the people I am working with to give their
best and form a positive connection with the organization.
Another professional skill that I believe that I must develop as an international
entrepreneur is cultural and emotional intelligence. As I will be working in global scenarios, I
will need to work with people coming from different cultural and ethnic background.
Developing my cultural intelligence and along with it my cross cultural communication skills
I will be able to understand how I should work in cross cultural scenarios and respond to
people coming from different culture (Almahry, Sarea and Hamdan 2018). Emotional
intelligence will allow me to understand the needs and desires of people who are working
with me. I will be able to control the expressions of my emotions and handle conflicts easily.
Apart from the professional skills I would also like to develop time management
skills. This skill is applicable both to my professional and personal development. Time
management will allow me to segregate tasks allocate time according to priority. Time
management also is effective in maintaining both personal and professional relationships and
invest equal time for both. In my career too, it will help me to manage that huge array of
tasks that I will need to do. This will help me to plan ahead and lower my tension and stress.
The free time I will get due to this can be used to develop other skills such as language
development and vocational courses to enhance my skills (Johnstone et al. 2018).
Another aspect that is necessary for entrepreneurs is decision making skills. In order
to make effective decisions I must ensure that my decisions are based on facts and
information. I must also ensure that the information that I use are complete and devoid of any
bias. One of the most common fallacies that can happen during decision making is bias.

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Assumptions, previous information and falsehood may affect my decision making which I
must analyze. Including several people in the decision making process helps in ruling out
biases and I intend to develop this skill as well.
The attributes that I would like to develop for my future career are resilience, and
patience. Resilience helps individuals to develop an ability to accept changes and situations.
It also enables one to fight in difficult scenarios (Cho and Lee 2018). It will give me the
ability to re-evaluate situations and take them positively. Patience will allow me to handle
situations with proper thought without becoming frustrated or pessimistic in my approach.
These personal development approaches will help in the development of the skills that I feel
that I lack.
2. Critically examine the interdependence of your own personal and professional
development and the relationship of both in order to effectively manage your career/life
plan.
Managing both personal and professional life is necessary. The steps that we take for
our personal development one way or the other affect our professional life. This is true for the
opposite as well. The skills that we develop and the abilities that we form in our professional
career also affect our personal habits and behavior. In order to achieve the intended career I
need to manage both my personal and professional life and development. Development in
both phases are necessary as they are likely to affect one another.
Personal development includes attributes such as empathy, resilience and patience
(Korte, Smith and Li 2018). These qualities will help me in my professional life as well. I
intend to become a good leader and entrepreneur which means that I will need to work with
diverse people. Personal development helps in becoming more mature and systematic in my
approach which will help me in my learning of the course. This approach will eventually help

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me in developing my time management skills that is essential for my professional excellence.
For my personal development I want to take vocational and communication course. I have
had problems in communicating with people effectively outside my close friends and family
circle. Through personal communication and reflecting on the previous incidents I will be
able to identify the mistakes that I do (Welsh, Tullar and Nemati 2016).
The cultural competency I want to develop is best achieved through personal
approach in our lives. In our locality and neighborhood, it is most likely that we will
encounter people coming from different culture. In learning institutions too, there are people
coming from cross border countries bringing in different sets of beliefs and rituals. The first
step to the development of cultural competency is to interact with people that I have easy
access to and understand the needs and desires of the people coming from different cultures.
Through communication with them and sharing our views I will be able to develop my
cultural intelligence. This same process can be applied to develop my emotional intelligence.
These skills provide me with better people management skills and takes me closer to my
actual goal of becoming a good leader.
Professional development also affects the personal life. Through professional
development I want to learn analysis and decision making skills. Though the analytical skills
will be developed to some extent in my personal life, managerial decision making skills will
only come from my experience with work. My future work experience will also help in the
development of decision making skills. These skills will help my personal development as
these can also be used for personal decision making (Akhmetshin et al., 2019). They will
make me cautious in my approach to problem and conflicts. Thus, I will be able to take better
decisions. Finally, it can be said that through an interdependency of personal and professional
development. I will be able to become mature and confident in my both personal and
professional life

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References
Akhmetshin, E.M., Kuderova, I.G., Ryumshin, A.V., Gayazova, S.R., Romanova, E.V. and
Erzinkyan, E.A., 2019. ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS DEVELOPMENT THROUGH
DISTANCE LEARNING. Journal of Entrepreneurship Education, 22, pp.1-12.
Akhmetshin, E.M., Larionova, G.N., Lukiyanchina, E.V., Savitskaya, Y.P., Aleks, R. and
Aleynikova, O.S., 2019. The Influence of Educational Environment on the Development of
Entrepreneurial Skills and Competencies in Students. Journal of Entrepreneurship
Education.
Almahry, F.F., Sarea, A.M. and Hamdan, A.M., 2018. A review paper on entrepreneurship
education and entrepreneurs' skills. Journal of Entrepreneurship Education.
Barba-Sánchez, V. and Atienza-Sahuquillo, C., 2018. Entrepreneurial intention among
engineering students: The role of entrepreneurship education. European Research on
Management and Business Economics, 24(1), pp.53-61.
Cho, Y.H. and Lee, J.H., 2018. Entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial education and
performance. Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 12(2), pp.124-134.
Hui, J.S. and Gerber, E.M., 2017, February. Developing makerspaces as sites of
entrepreneurship. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported
Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 2023-2038). ACM.
Johnstone, L., Monteiro, M.P., Ferreira, I., Westerlund, J., Aalto, R. and Marttinen, J., 2018.
Language ability and entrepreneurship education: Necessary skills for Europe’s start-
ups?. Journal of International Entrepreneurship, 16(3), pp.369-397.

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Korte, R., Smith, K.A. and Li, C.Q., 2018. The Role of Empathy in Entrepreneurship: A Core
Competency of the Entrepreneurial Mindset. Advances in Engineering Education, 7(1), p.n1.
Welsh, D.H., Tullar, W.L. and Nemati, H., 2016. Entrepreneurship education: Process,
method, or both?. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 1(3), pp.125-132.