It’s been a while – nearly five years, to be precise – but here I am, back online with a shiny spruced-up new-look website, and I’m raring to go.
Some of you may have followed me on my old site back in the day, and some of you might be taking a look here for the very first time, but to all of you – welcome!
When I reflect back to five years’ ago, it strikes me just how much has changed since then. At that point in my life I thought that my career in education was probably coming to an end – but what an amazing time it had been. There’d been National Awards, Journal Publications, International Speaking Engagements, and a Directorship of Enterprise Educators UK. Things were good, I’d been successful, and I thought I’d done it all – but now I realise that, far from being the end, it was actually just the beginning.
Now I’m returning to this website and embarking upon a new chapter of my story, both personally and professionally. I am armed with the knowledge and experience that the last five years have brought me, through an incredible period of professional exploration (and I in this time I have gotten married too, so am also armed with a rampant two-year-old, which makes everything more chaotic, challenging and exciting!). I’ve learnt more about growing companies, leading people, and building strong relationships than I’d have been able to do in almost any other context. Now is the time to take what I’ve learnt and really do something with it; switch direction and begin a new journey, that I want you to be a part of too.
So, what have I learnt? Well, sometimes the first step is learning what you don’t know – and working at the sharp edge of SME development in a tough economy has shown me just how much I didn’t know about business. Now that I’m back in education, I’m able to see just how unfit for purpose some of the things being taught to students about ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ are.
This makes me more determined than ever to challenge people to create a better curriculum, to influence positive change, to discover the best ways to prepare students for the uncertain markets that we are almost certainly facing in the next few years, especially in light of Brexit, and to find ways to implement this.
This blog is a space for me – and you – to be able to talk about important current issues in the field of enterprise, entrepreneurship and education. Maybe it will be a topic that I want to develop a strategy for. Perhaps it will be sharing a useful resource that I feel could help my fellow educators. Or it could simply be an idea that I’d like to get your thoughts and feedback on; to open a dialogue, start a conversation. This is a space for me to share what I’m passionate about, and hopefully it will be engaging, challenging, and inspire other education professionals to do the same.
But for now, big thanks to all of you who are reading this and who are raring to go too, and I hope that this is just the beginning of us getting to know each other. Drop me a message, post a comment, get stuck in – give me a shout anytime, anyhow.
Best, Matt
