Ahh, tax time, the time of year when even we left-brain
thinkers find ourselves overwhelmed with the prospect of all those forms,
calculations, and tests for eligibility, applicability, and exclusions.
I’m reminded of Robert Duvall’s character in
the movie,
Apocalypse Now, when he
comments, “I love the smell of napalm first thing in the morning.”
Only a character as twisted as that could
love all this tax stuff!
The only good thing about tax time is that it brings out my
empathy for all those folks who find it difficult to understand finance and
apply financial principles to the workplace.
So, as I’ve been lamenting all of my own tax forms and calculations,
I’ve come up with a few tips for programs and people who attempt to provide
financial training:
- Be specific—don’t speak to
vague concepts or theories, but rather the application of those concepts
or theories to real life situations and problems. You can’t expect learners to relate to
something ethereal.
- Make learning
relevant—don’t teach finance just for the sake of teaching finance. Make the learning relevant to the
learners’ company and their jobs.
Show them how incorporating financial concepts into their decision
making can make them better and more effective at what they do.
- Provide resources—in the
form of job aids or people that can assist in the application of financial
concepts. All of the major tax
software vendors figured this out really fast—people need help with tasks
and concepts that are new to them or that they don’t practice very
often. We need to do the same thing
in the workplace.
- Keep the learning
simple—our job as teachers and trainers is to take complex subject matter
and make it as simple and straightforward as possible. (Hopefully, somebody from the IRS is
reading this…)
I’d love to build this list out into a “Top Ten” list, so
feel free to share your ideas by posting them to this blog. (Maybe you, too, will be inspired as you work
your way through the maze of tax forms and tests…) Or, if you’d just like to commiserate about
taxes, that’s good too!
As always, you can also send an email to me at my personal
email address: pae@tmiwebmail.com.
Until next time,
Trish
