Assessment of Personal Competencies and Skills

In this lesson, identify areas for improvement, development, and growth, align
your PECs according to your business or career choice, and create a plan of
action that ensures success in your business or career choice.
Entrepreneurial competencies refer to the important characteristics that should
be possessed by an individual in order to perform entrepreneurial functions
effectively.
Below are few important characteristics / traits / attributes of a good
entrepreneur:
1. Hardworking 5. Ability to accept change
2. Confident 6. Creative
3. Disciplined 7. Has the initiative
4. Committed 8. Profit-oriented

Listed below are the important skills of a successful entrepreneur:

Excellent planner: Planning involves strategic thinking and goal
setting to achieve objectives by carefully maximizing all the available
resources.
Possesses people skills: People skills refer to effective and efficient
communication and establishing good relationship to the people
working in and out of your business. In day-to-day business
transactions, you need to deal with people
Sound decision maker: Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to
think quickly and to make wise decisions towards a pre-determined
set of objectives.
In this lesson, you should learn how to align one’s PECs according to his/her business/career choice.

In venturing into entrepreneurship, one must consider the challenges of what launching a business will
bring. Some of the challenges experienced by first-time business owners are the lack of experience in
launching and running a business and the insufficient skills in managing the people and resources.
Anyone who wants to succeed in running a business must have a set of characteristics fit to become a
successful entrepreneur. This is called the Personal Entrepreneurial Competencies or PECs. These are
abilities that help an entrepreneur in meeting the challenges of the business.

What are types of PECs? These abilities are clustered into three groups: achievement, power and
planning.

 Achievement cluster focuses mainly on results and methodology. The qualities included in
this group are opportunity seeking and initiative, risk taking, demand for efficiency and
quality, persistence, and commitment to the work contract.
o Opportunity seeking and initiative is to act immediately when the opportunity arises
and pays attention to the needs of the customers.
o Risk taking is being proactive yet able to calculate the risks and minimize losses.
o Demand for efficiency and quality means accomplishing tasks. It also means
performing businesses better, faster and cheaper.
o Persistence is to face a challenge with a good plan. It comes up with a good
alternative to meet a challenge or business demand.
o Commitment to the work contract is to accomplish goals on time.
 The planning cluster concentrates on the workflow processes and the goal-setting part of the
business. The skills belonging to this group includes information seeking, goal setting, and
systematic planning and monitoring.
o Information seeking is studying the market for a new product or service.
o Goal setting is coming up with specific, calculated objectives and goals.
o Systematic planning and monitoring is to be logically flexible and making an
organized plan with defined and proven methodologies.
 The last group, the power cluster, is inclined to the soft skills of the entrepreneur and it
includes persuasion and networking, and independence and self-confidence.
o Persuasion and networking is to give facts to customers and convince them to buy
the product.
o Independence and self confidence is to develop self-esteem and trust that you will
achieve your goals.

Aligning these characteristics to the business you intend to pursue enables you to become a better
leader and negotiator. You also need to note the areas that need improvement as well as apply your
strengths to areas that matter the most. For example, if your business offers customer support, the
PEC that you should develop should be focused on the planning cluster. To be precise, you need to
have the right information about your customers, list down goals, have a systematic approach in
answering the customer's needs and monitoring if these approaches are successful.