Nearly a quarter of Gen Z looks toward owning their own business as a means to financial security

Welcome back. Young adults in the US, ages 18 to 34, are more likely than any other generation to say that owning their own business is key to financial security. That’s according to a new CNBC Global Your Money survey. As part of its financial education initiative, CNBC, in partnership with Junior Achievement, brought together business leaders to discuss founding a company as a possible career path. CNBC Sharon Epperson has a look at how this career exploration program in Denver aims to inspire high school students to become entrepreneurs. Here at the Junior Achievement Free Enterprise Center in Denver, students from area high schools are learning from local entrepreneurs about what it takes to start your own business. Never say no. Camila Uzcategi founded Vitro 3D while a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. She says a key to developing the company’s 3D printing like technology was learning from failure. In all of those challenges, I kind of like to see them as opportunities to either, you know, pivot into a potentially new direction or pivot into a better way of understanding something. MOA Hale believes ownership is key to building wealth. For me, I just knew that if I didn’t take that step to be an entrepreneur that I would really regret it. Holly founded Sky Blue Builders during the Great Recession in 2009. The main thing is having passion about what you do, and so as long as you have that passion, any obstacles that you have, you can overcome. He wanted his fifty person team to have a stake in the construction company too, so he recently made a deal with outside vendors to convert his firm to an employee owned business. Robin Wise has LED Junior Achievement Rocky Mountain for three decades. She says programs at this center help students visualize their futures to achieve their goals and impact their community. It’s not the sit and get kind of thing. Some of this thing, some of these things can’t be taught. They have to be caught. These high school students say Here they’re opening their minds to new ideas, expands my dreams, dreams that I didn’t even know that I probably had. The word that brought up for me was bold, which I thought was very close. Everything is not going to go your way no matter what you do. So just always lift up your head and just keep pushing. Nearly five and a half million businesses were started in the US last year, the most on record, according to the Census Bureau. These students could drive those numbers even higher, one day confessing, You know, it’s interesting. My mom, who was a lifelong teacher, said to me, I I’m sort of on this cusp of thinking that we shouldn’t be teaching all of this trigonometry in algebra and whatever. We should be teaching finance and entrepreneurship to fund and to see success in the in the next generation of young who finds this program? Well, the people who understand that that’s the next generation entrepreneurs. This program, this free enterprise center in Denver just opened last year, 18 and a half, $1,000,000 for this facility to open. And all of that money came from entrepreneurs. OK, so CNBC has partnered with Junior Achievement on financial education and initiatives around the country. How does this Junior Achievement program differ from that? Well, they have a lot of different programs around the country. A lot of places have a finance park where you can go in and kind of simulate what your adult life will be like, holding down a job, making sure that you’re paying your rent, what insurance do you need? All of those types of things. And they have that in Denver. But what they have and what these students were doing that day is something called the Dream Accelerator. They go into various stations and they kind of visualize what the possible career path could be. One place is a selfie station. They figure out what some of their strengths are and how what their aspirations are and what they are. Their aptitude is now what that could lead to for a career path. They loved it. It sounds like an opportunity that a lot of grownups would jump at the chance to exactly, Absolutely. And the teachers love it for their students because they’re teaching some things in the classroom. But this really gives them some hands on experience and some opportunity to catch that inspiration from local entrepreneurs. Hear what they did, how they made it, and how they can do the same.