Business Planning

Wealth Creation

Investing

Marketing

Personal Development

Career Development
Entrepreneurship

Our current education system is a diverse collection of amazing topics and subjects that will delight and amuse the student for years.  However, there are a few problems with it.

1. It doesn’t fully prepare the student for life beyond school, or university, for such life skills as financial intelligence, business strategy and planning, or how to be entrepreneurial in life situations.
2. School does not properly prepare students in the manner that employers need them to be prepared.  They generally do not understand what employers need of them, or what a business requires of them for their employment to be a profitable business venture.
3. Personal development, communication, conflict resolution and other life skills are not taught in a way that benefits the student in the areas of developing meaningful life and business relationships, or with the skills to deal with the issues arising from them.
4. Far too many students leave the system with minimal standards of literacy and numeracy, in many cases hardly enough to study to pass a drivers licence exam, or read simple product instructions, safety warnings, or cooking recipes.

The result is that many students are educated to such a poor standard that it prevents them from applying for jobs with written applications, performing many tasks as an employee that require maths or reading instructions, manuals or writing reports.  It is a life sentence to poverty and ignorance in a society of general affluence.

Our students are learning much about many areas within the curriculum that fail them in the two fundamental output requirements of an education system:

1. It prepares the student for a career, vocation or business
2. It instils the yearning for further learning

With these two failings, the student stumbles out of the education system into a world for which they are unprepared and which doesn’t really care about those who can’t look after themselves.  These become casualties of society in other ways from then on.

By removing or minimizing some of the less relevant subjects and giving more prominence to subjects that taught and educated the students in these areas, the end result would be the development and fostering a nation of creative and entrepreneurial people who were not only able to face the challenges of the ever changing and developing world, but to step up and take initiatives to steer and guide those changes and the evolutionary steps that are to come.

Career Development is a critical area which has been not only neglected, but the results of the neglect hidden by the dodgy statistics that have been called "Employment" figures.  The reality is that the unemployment figures have for years been taken from the results of surveys of a supposedly representative number of phonecalls, and "seasonally adjusted" to correct them from month to month, year to year.  However, if a person was unemployed, but actually did a small amount of part time work in the period, they were classified as "employed" and the results statistically skewed again!  Recently, the number of households surveyed was reduced significantly, further reducing the already questionable accuracy of the survey.

What is needed is the printout of the numbers of people receiving the different benefits paid by Centrelink, to give us the accurate total numbers of people actually receiving unemployment benefits or other benefits.

The truth shall set you free!

Once the real unemployment number is known, then we can develop programs to deal with the issue and restore full employment!  That needs to include programs like the "Job Clubs" that were so successful in the 1990's, taking a dozen unemployed people at a time, over a month, teaching them life and job search skills and how to present themselves for a new career opportunity, whether that is a full or part time job, or a self employment business opportunity..

Centrelink needs to be outcome based, with timeframes and performance criteria, and it can only make the transition to this basis by knowing and acting on the true numbers, not the survey numbers.

Keys to this are genuine small business training, where every jobseeker is given a basic course in small business.  This is not to train them to open small businesses, but to give everyone an appreciation of what small business is about, and how to become valuable to a small business, as an employee AND a profit centre for the small business.  Unless the person is a sound business investment, a business cannot afford to employ them.

The small business education needs to begin in high school, along with an entrepreneurship module, to enable those with the inclination and intent to start their business careers early when it counts.  The benefits to the job seeker/high school graduate will be enormous.

For those not desiring further education at university into a profession, vocational training is an answer.  However, many trades people eventually become small businesses as self employed sole operator tradesman businesses, but with virtually no knowledge of how to operate businesses.  A critical element of vocational training is the small business module, teaching them how to work for themselves as professional tradespeople, when they complete their apprenticeships.

Technology is powering the planet in many ways, many unexpected also, making jobs and careers obsolete rapidly and creating whole new industries from the ruins, without having people trained into those new industries.  As people are made redundant from the diminishing industries, they are often untrained and ill-prepared for career change into a world that may be leaving them behind.

Genuine career change education, including small business education, needs to be implemented and made freely available for those needing mid-life career change.  Some estimates have the numbers of people unsatisfied with their careers at a staggering 75%, all of whom could benefit from career change education and a translocation into a career path where they would find satisfaction.  The resultant productivity increases and workforce stability  will be a bonus for both employers and families.

The reality is that education does not stop at the end of school, it is lifelong, and needs to be provided on a lifelong basis.  Part of the education revolution must be the provision of education where and when it is needed, at a price affordable by those who need it.

What can you do?

Agitate for the truth to be told about unemployment statistics.

Demand that your child's school teaches financial management, investment concepts, business planning and small business modules and entrepreneurship as at least elective, if not compulsory subjects.  Raise this as a topic for discussion at school P & C meetings and take it to the education department with the strongest message possible.

Our kids are our future!