Personal Finance Course Description

In the scenario below, you will get to see an example of a working professional who – in their own career – successfully got help to develop a top-notch personal finance course syllabus and accompanying course.

Theo is the main event coordinator for local non-profit organization, where he’s managed to work his way up in less than 2 years. These days, however, he supervises 16 college-aged support staff members – which has proven to be a fulfilling professional experience for him. After several of his team members came up to him with personal finance-related questions, he decided to start organizing a personal finance course description for a class he would plan for them. He was already quite familiar with each member on his relatively small team, and he understood the topic thoroughly, but he knew he would need help for some pieces of the puzzle.

After completing an informal survey with a sample of the members of his group, he quickly understood that the majority of them lacked even a basic grasp of the subject at hand.

Theo had already settled on his goal for the near-term: give this team a solid level of understanding on money management principles so that they could apply it to their own personal financial lives outside of work. Thanks to the limited free time and unforgiving schedules that this group had each week, he was willing to just develop a personal finance course syllabus that would be broken down into 1-hour portions. For this reason, doing a condensed program would have to be his strategy.

With these particular courses he planned to offer, his end goal was for everyone to reach the “Applying” level of understanding.

Theo already had his goals for the time being, so he then needed to settle on his ideal delivery strategy for his personal finance course. Given this group’s lack of a reasonable amount of availability, he realized that an achievement-based course would be best. This is because it would motivate them to reach the end of each phase.

Zeroing in on a Personal Finance Course Syllabus

Theo had to then whittle down the core focus of his personal finance course description. The wide majority of this group consisted of university scholars, so he planned to focus the program on student loans and managing debt.

Theo, at that point, had to reach out to some sort of experienced educator who could help deliver the contents within the personal finance course syllabus to his team. He hoped to find a presenter that was skilled at teaching this age group, as well as one that had a proven track record of success leading financial literacy programs.

The presenter he selected was a verified Certified Financial Education Instructor (CFEI) from the NFEC.

Designing the Best Curriculum

Theo would need to provide a helpful personal finance course description that could still be beneficial in spite of the scheduling constraints he faced. With that thinking, he opted to develop a flexible syllabus that would be broken up into smaller modular units that can be completed whenever the employees had available free time.  He also opted in for a online personal finance lessons to be delivered.

Of the 16 team members who participated in the course outlined in Patrick’s personal finance course description, 15 ended up completing the whole thing with a median improvement of 19%. His next action was to compile the data and draft a report so that he could present it to the higher-ups in his organization.  This reported defined personal finance outcomes and provided participant feedback.