This article is written by Margherita Bacigalupo, scientific officer at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre and co-author of the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework

How do you actually feel at work most of the time? It’s a difficult question for most people to answer truthfully. A more straightforward way of asking it might be: Does your job excite you? Does it motivate you? At the very least, does it allow you to reach your potential?

I’m lucky enough to be able to say that my job does so on all counts, albeit after 20 years, and not all of them spent in public service.

On average, most public administration employees start to lose motivation at work after about five years. Some are able to climb the hierarchy, gain greater responsibility and develop managerial and negotiation skills. Most, however, move laterally in search of new motivations.

There’s nothing wrong with either the lateral or vertical career move. Both can make people happier and more hirable, provided the end result is something they actually want. This is often not the case, however. Often, what a public servant wants is simply to feel excited, proud and inspired to do their job. That shouldn’t have to mean changing domains.

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I myself have worked in advertising, air traffic control, dementia care, food manufacturing, and, finally, as a researcher in lifelong learning. All of these jobs were very exciting at first, but in each of them, after a few years, I started to lose interest. I felt that there wasn’t much more to learn. After a while, moving from domain to domain just felt like a sentence.

Then I got into the world of entrepreneurial learning, which allows you to learn whilst creating something new and that offers value to others.

Before I go on, let me point out one small caveat: entrepreneurial learning is not at all learning to create new business ventures. It is not about coming up with disruptive ideas with which to shake up existing paradigms or exploit gaps in the market. Rather, it is about generating purposeful ideas, then testing those ideas daily until one of them becomes a real-world opportunity.

As civil servants, we do what we are told to do, and we do it exactly the way in which we are told to do it.

Creating value for others triggers a learners’ motivation to work hard, to get others onboard and to mobilise resources that turn ideas into action. Entrepreneurial learning works because it brings to the learning experience key motivational drivers, such as agency, novelty, excitement and inspiration.

I started wondering if what keeps learners keen to learn might also keep employees keen to work.

Details about the research conducted to answer this are presented in the JRC Science for Policy report entitled: ‘The entrepreneurial employee in the public and private sector’. The report’s main message is that schools focus on learning, while the adult workplace focuses on creating and growing value. The two needn’t be treated as exclusive, however, and this is where it is necessary to strike a balance between working and learning. This equilibrium benefits individuals and organisations alike by generating greater motivation, fuller engagement and overall higher job satisfaction while seeding innovation.

Let me give you an example that comes from my own organisation: the SELFIE project. SELFIE is a free, customisable tool to help schools assess how they use digital technologies to support learning, which has reached one million users across 74 countries. SELFIE is a team effort, but it began with one researcher who wanted his research to create value for headmasters, teachers and students. He started an internal discussion on his idea to turn a study on digitally competent educational organisations into an easy-to-use tool for schools to weigh up where they stand with learning in the digital age.

He got the hierarchy on board and started building a strong partnership with education policy officers and the European Commission department for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. Together, they mobilised resources to test the idea. They started small, with a user consultation survey to verify that its vision was really meeting an unmet user need. They then improved the idea, developed prototypes, collected feedback in the field, and grew a team until they could go live.

SELFIE is an ideal example of what it means to be entrepreneurial: creating new (public) value for others and learning in the process of creating that value. From an organisational point of view, SELFIE is an innovation that has increased the value for citizens. From an individual point of view, it has been (and still is) a challenging endeavor that has kept colleagues excited and motivated in spite of obstacles.

SELFIE also demonstrates that when we step outside of our prescribed civil service roles and embrace a more entrepreneurial way of thinking, we can serve the public in ways that both amplify and enhance those roles.

Around about now you might be thinking: “Here goes yet another person lecturing to us about why we should act like entrepreneurs. Do entrepreneurs have to endure the reverse spiel about why they should act like public administrators?” Hear me out.

As civil servants, we do what we are told to do, and we do it exactly the way in which we are told to do it. We do it this way because we are accountable, most notably for how public money is spent. This in turn explains why government organisations are often considered among the least experimental to work for. Instead of seeking to create value propositions, they cling to those in which money is already bound up.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated about being denied the resources needed to follow through on an idea at work, or ever started a project you cared about only to be overwhelmed by it, you may really want to get into entrepreneurial learning.

After all, people are not born with entrepreneurial flair. They pick it up, often through necessity. It requires the willingness to create something new, as well as a few competences, such as vision, the capacity to work with others, to cope with ambiguity and risk, and to mobilise the right instruments within the organisation.

The good news is that the more you do it, the better you will get at it. When we act upon an opportunity, or liaise to create something new that we know will help others, our work renews its meaning. We finally become owners of what we do and how we do it, which lessens the need to change jobs by keeping our motivations in the same place that first attracted us to our roles.

If you do not know where to begin, identify what you really care about as a public servant, who you want to create value for, and go for it. Meanwhile, check out the being entrepreneurial canvas, where I hope your venture into value creation will begin. — Margherita Bacigalupo

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