For years I have watched the efforts of financial educators to teach the hard skills of Financial Literacy. Hard skills include banking, budgeting, retirement and more. While I agree that these skills are critical to posses for all of us, they do not take the most important part of financial literacy seriously, emphasizing only the hard skills lacks a necessary focus on emotional intelligence. This gets compounded when addressing the economically disadvantaged population of this country, for they have very few role models to follow.
Why Is This Important?
Charles Riborg Mann conducted his study on soft skills verses hard skills in 1918 (A Study of Engineering Education, 1918) Here are his results:
Soft skills in financial literacy are as follows:
- Financial Goal Setting
- Self-Efficacy
- Values Congruence
- Achievement Drive
- Supportive Environment
- Self-Control
- Self-Management
- Problem Solving
- Resiliency
- Self-Improvement
- Personal Responsibility
All of these soft skills are part of Conover’s new Financial Literacy System-Emotional Intelligence.
Coming this fall.
https://www.conovercompany.com/downloads/financial_literacy_eq.pdf
