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Money Matters: What schools aren’t teaching — but should be

By Pete Ord - Special to the Daily Herald | Sep 3, 2022

Courtesy Shutterstock

Teachers, especially Utah teachers, are amazing! They guide young people through the crucial growing-up years, tirelessly offering resources, support and mentorship.

As a parent and an employer, I’ve had the opportunity to see how prepared Utah students are and also observe a few gaps — skills that are taught here and there but that I believe would be well suited for more formal instruction. In my experience, these four topics would help prepare students for professional life and other pursuits they might undertake in the future: building positive relationships in professional settings, project management, interpersonal communication and logic.

Building positive relationships in professional settings

Building good relationships is crucial for professionals, but sometimes it is difficult when there are poor processes in place or when there simply hasn’t been sufficient training. 

For students preparing to start down their chosen path in the world, learning specific skills for building positive relationships with clients, colleagues and leaders will serve them well. It can help them be more successful in their first job after high school, find mentors in college and their professions and function more confidently with professionals in their personal lives.

So, what skills should they be learning? At GUIDEcx, we’re all about providing excellent customer experiences from the start of a relationship. I believe these customer success principles can be adapted for different situations, from working with an interior decorator to giving a presentation to a boss:

  • Offer something that the person needs. If some mold appears in your bathroom, be prepared with the history of the problem so you can help the mold remover help you. 
  • Helping them reach their goals. Is a professor in your field of choice working on some research? Volunteer to help a couple of hours a week.
  • Keep the person updated. Is your part of the project going to be late? Let your colleague know as soon as possible so they can be better prepared.
  • Recognize when you can’t help them. No one can be all things to all people. If your boss is asking you to do a task you really aren’t equipped to do, be upfront, suggest a colleague who might be a better fit and offer to help elsewhere.

Project management

These days, with project management softwares used in virtually every organization, a lot of the work professionals have to do is in the context of long-term projects broken into tasks that require collaboration among colleagues. 

Think back to your time as a student working on projects. How many times did you have to stay up late working on something you put off until the night before the due date? How many times did your partner not pull their own weight, leaving the bulk of the work to you? Unfortunately, a lot of these problems carry over into the professional world (and, let’s face it, into our home improvement projects). It would make a huge difference in productivity and stress levels for students to formally learn how to manage and coordinate work, both as an individual and as part of a team.

Skills students could learn in a project management course include the following:

  • Time management
  • Collaboration and digital collaboration
  • Road mapping
  • Communication and status reporting

Interpersonal communication

According to http://Indeed.com, communication is the top skill hiring managers are looking for in job candidates. 

“Communication skills are needed in virtually any job,” the Indeed editorial team said. “Employers desire team members who can successfully interpret what is being asked of them as well as effectively communicate with others.”

While speech class and etiquette courses are rarely taught in schools these days, bringing formal communication instruction back would be excellent! Beyond writing, students should learn confident speaking, active listening and effective negotiating to round out their interpersonal communication skills. And speaking of etiquette, books like “52 Modern Manners For Today’s Teensby Utah’s Brooke Romney can also be helpful preparation for the “real world.”

Logic

The word logic comes from the Ancient Greek logike, meaning “the art of reasoning.” Logic is all about evaluating arguments to discern good or bad reasoning to help you figure out if a conclusion is accurate. At school, at work and even while scrolling through social media, we are constantly faced with ideas and claims; using logic can help us form sound beliefs and make good decisions based on the information we are presented with. 

While we might all feel we are logical people, the truth is that our emotions and intuition play a huge role in our decisions. That isn’t a negative thing, but it is important to marry our feelings with sound thought processes so that we can make the best decisions. Learning the principles of logic in school would be enormously helpful as students start making more and more of their own decisions.

Kids learn so much in school, but there are a few skills they might be missing. Building positive relationships in professional settings, project management, interpersonal communication and logic are four topics that would help prepare students to be more successful and confident as they venture forth on their own. 

Peter Ord is the founder of GUIDEcx, a client implementation and onboarding project platform based in Lehi.

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