Principles of Business and Personal Finance
NC Competency 011: Analyze and develop an individualized career plan.
NC Objective 11.01: Analyze the characteristics, requirements, and availability of careers in business and marketing.
I. Workplace Competencies – Effective Workers Can Productively Use:
A. Workplace Know-How: The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) was asked to examine the demands of the workplace and whether young people are capable of meeting those demands.
Specifically, the Commission was directed to advise the Secretary on the level of skills required to enter employment. The following are the skills and competencies employers said were essential for success in the workplace:
B. Resources: They know how to allocate time, money, materials, space and staff.
SCANS: Identifies, organizes, plans, and allocates resources
1. Time: Selects goal-relevant activities, ranks them, allocates time, and prepares and follows schedules
2. Money: Uses or prepares budgets, makes forecasts, keeps records, and makes adjustment to meet objectives
3. Material and Facilities: Acquires, stores, allocates, and uses materials or space efficiently
4. Human Resources: Assesses skills and distributes work accordingly, evaluates performance and provides feedback
C. Interpersonal Skills: They can work on teams, teach others, serve customers, lead, negotiate, and work well with people from culturally diverse backgrounds.
SCANS: Works with others
1. Participates as Member of a Team: contributes to group effort
2. Teaches Others New Skills
3. Serves Clients/Customers: works to satisfy customers’ expectations
4. Exercises Leadership: communicates ideas to justify position, persuades and convinces others, responsibly challenges existing procedures and policies
5. Negotiates: works toward agreements involving exchange of resources, resolves divergent interests
6. Works with Diversity: works well with men and women from diverse backgrounds
D. Information: They can acquire and evaluate data, organize and maintain files, interpret and communicate, and use computers to process information.
SCANS: Acquires and uses information
1. Acquires and Evaluates Information
2. Organizes and Maintains Information
3. Interprets and Communicates Information
4. Uses Computers to Process Information
E. Systems: They understand social, organizational, and technological systems; they can monitor and correct performance; and they can design or improve systems.
SCANS: Understands complex interrelationships
1. Understands Systems: knows how social, organizational, and technological systems work and operates effectively with them
2. Monitors and Corrects Performance: distinguishes trends, predicts impacts on system operations, diagnoses systems performance and corrects malfunctions
3. Improves or Designs Systems: suggests modifications to existing systems and develops new or alternative systems to improve performance
F. Technology: They can select equipment and tools, apply technology to specific tasks, and maintain and troubleshoot equipment.
SCANS: Works with a variety of technologies
1. Selects Technology: chooses procedures, tools or equipment including computers and related technologies
2. Applies Technology to Task: understands overall intent and proper procedures for setup and operation of equipment
3. Maintains and Troubleshoots Equipment: prevents, identifies, or solves problems with equipment, including computers and other technologies
II. Foundation Skills – Competent Workers in the High Performance Workplace Need:
A. Basic Skills: Reading, writing, arithmetic and mathematics, speaking, and listening.
SCANS: Reads, writes, performs arithmetic and mathematical operation, listens and speaks.
1. Reading: locates, understands, and interprets written information in prose and in documents such as manuals, graphs, and schedules
2. Writing: communicates thoughts, ideas, information, and messages in writing, and creates documents such as letters, directions, manuals, reports, graphs, and flow charts
3. Arithmetic/Mathematics: performs basic computations and approaches practical problems by choosing appropriately from a variety of mathematical techniques
4. Listening: receives, attends to, interprets, and responds to verbal messages and cues
5. Speaking: organizes ideas and communicates orally
B. Thinking Skills: The ability to learn, to reason, to think creatively, to make decisions, and to Solve problems.
SCANS: Thinks creatively, makes decisions, solves problems, visualizes, knows how to learn, and reasons
1. Creative Thinking: generates new ideas
2. Decision Making: specifies goals and constraints, generates alternatives, considers risks, and evaluates and chooses best alternative
3. Problem Solving: recognizes problems and devises and implements plan of action
4. Seeing Things in the Mind’s Eye: organizes, and processes symbols, pictures, graphs, objects, and other information
5. Knowing How to Learn: uses efficient learning techniques to acquire and apply new knowledge and skills
6. Reasoning: discovers a rule or principle underlying the relationship between two or more objects and applies it when solving a problem
C. Personal Qualities: Individual responsibility, self-esteem, and self-management, sociability, and integrity.
SCANS: Displays responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and
integrity and honesty
1. Responsibility: exerts a high level of effort and perseveres towards goal attainment
2. Self-Esteem: believes in own self-worth and maintains a positive view of self
3. Sociability: demonstrates understanding, friendliness, adaptability, empathy, and politeness in group settings
4. Self-Management: assesses self accurately, sets personal goals, monitors progress, and exhibits self-control
5. Integrity/Honesty: chooses ethical courses of action
III. Two Major Types of Occupations
A. Service Occupations: Occupations that satisfy the needs of other businesses and consumers (i.e., nurse, dry cleaner, and accountant).
B. Goods-Producing Occupations: Occupations that manufacture products (i.e., automobile plant worker, carpenter, furniture marker, computer assembler).
IV. Demand for Occupations is Created by Many Factors
A. Consumer preference or demand for certain goods and services:
B. Business cycles: recurrent periods during which the nation’s economy moves in and out of recession and recovery phases.
C. New technologies: emerging technological advances will require more people trained in these specialty areas to operate the equipment/computes.
D. Business Competition: The rivalry among businesses to sell their goods and services to buyers.
E. Societal Trends: shifts in how/what is produced causes a shift in demand for certain workers. When was the last time you saw a “car-hop”?
V. Key Career Exploration Terms
A. Career Areas: are clusters of jobs that fall into a particular career category such as education (career area) teacher, counselor, administrator, etc. (individual job titles)
B. Education: The highest diploma or degree, or level of work towards a diploma or degree, an individual has completed.
C. Training: formal or informal training you receive in order to satisfactorily complete a task/job.
D. Earnings: Remuneration (pay, wages) of a worker or group of workers for services performed during a specific period of time. The term invariably carries a defining word or a combination; e.g., straight-time average hourly earnings. Since a statistical concept is usually involved in the term and its variations, the producers and users of earnings data have an obligation to define them. In the absence of such definition, the following may serve as rough guides:
1. Hourly, daily, weekly, annual: Period of time to which earnings figures, as stated or computed, relate. The context in which annual earnings (sometimes weekly earnings) are used may indicate whether the reference includes earnings from one employer only or from all employment plus other sources of income;
2. average: usually the arithmetic mean; that is, total earnings (as defined) of a group of workers (as identified) divided by the number of workers in the group;
3. gross: usually total earnings, before any deductions (such as tax withholding) including, where applicable, overtime payments, shift differentials, production bonuses, cost-of-living allowances, commissions, etc.;
4. straight-time: usually gross earnings excluding overtime payments and (with variations at this point) shift differentials and other monetary payments
E. Employment outlook: statistical and governmental information on trends towards certain job demands. The Occupational Outlook Handbook is an excellent source for this information.
F. Physical demands: what human physical demands a job requires you to be able to complete in order to satisfactorily complete the task. i.e., lift 50-pounds, walk, climb, etc.
G. Temperaments: the style of learner/worker you are. Do you prefer to work alone or with people, in the a quite room or full of distractions?
H. Work hours: the time you begin and stop working each day for a job
I. Travel requirements: whether you are required to travel from location to location or if your job is at one physical location.
J. Data, people and things: statistical information on jobs, the types of people of perform them and the types of things you would be required to do/know in that field.
VI. Key Sources of Career Information
A. The Occupational Outlook Handbook: http://www.bls.gov/oco/
B. Job shadowing: Shadowing is a short-term educational experience in which a student observes an employee on the job for part or all of the workday.
C. Interviewing: method in which an employer and a prospective employee discuss a job and the requirements to perform the job.
D. Career Advising Web Sites: http://www.umanitoba.ca/counselling/careers.html
http://www.lcahec.net/student.html