Entrepreneurial DNA? City & Guilds and Bruce Beresford find out what our vocational billionaires and millionaires have in common...

Could a hands-on approach to business help you to protect your earnings when the credit crunch bites? The 2008 City & Guilds Vocational Rich List shows how Britain's self-made millionaires are doing just that and convincingly bucking the economic slowdown.

At the top of the rankings, the four billionaires who feature in the Vocational Rich List have increased their collective wealth by £1.2 million in the last year alone. To follow in their footsteps, see below those common character traits shared by the 'Rich Listers' that have helped contribute to their commercial success:

• Strong self-belief - 23 of the nation's 25 wealthiest vocational millionaires are self-made, and the remaining two chose to take on the family business and used their nouse to expand and transform them into multi-million pound operations
  
  
• Getting rich takes time - the average age of the 25 wealthiest vocational millionaires is 61 years, and even within the top 100 there are only three millionaires aged under 40
  
  
• Patience and perseverance pay off - 80% of the top 25 millionaires are still working in the fields in which they first started out, illustrating how learning on the job can lead to a lifetime of success
  
  
• Go for graft over glamour - while the top 100 millionaires include a number of familiar names such as Stella McCartney, Jamie Oliver and Rolf Harris, celebrity does not guarantee a personal fortune.  The only household name in the top 10 is Sir James Dyson, but the collective wealth of the 10 wealthiest millionaires accounts for  around two-thirds of the wealth of the UK's top 100 'Rich Listers'
  
  
• The ability to recover after a fall is key to long-term success - among the millionaires are Paul Davidson of pipe repair company Fluid Leader, who declared bankruptcy in 2004 but has since built an impressive second fortune of £40 million, and John Bloor of Triumph motorbikes, who brought the company back from the brink of collapse in 2002 when much of the company burnt down
  

The City & Guilds Vocational Rich list 2008 top ten >