Never go wrong on the basics choosing a financial education provider

Once you’ve decided that your teen needs to learn about money and how to make smarter money decisions, gear-up for the next step: Choosing a financial education provider. With myriad options available, choosing the one to teach your teen this vitally important life-skill requires a lot of planning.

Here’s a checklist to look for in a provider that that will increase the odds of success - and that of the kid’s too.

Go for specialists

Ensure the chosen institution are specialists in financial education. Many tack on financial education to the range of other subjects they teach like stock trading, public speaking or even yoga. This results in trite advice and generic tips that don’t do much in furthering students’ financial knowledge.

Choosing a provider that specializes in financial education would ensure the individual gets deeper knowledge and insights. It also ensures one that’s not biased to a particular philosophy.

Market experience

It helps enormously to ensure that the provider has market experience. This weeds out the Johnny-come-latelies who may not have the learnings to know what works and what doesn’t. Choosing a provider with three or more years of market understanding would ensure the provider can draw on their learnings to deliver a truly rounded program.

Clientele

It’s beneficial to check whether provider has a good mix of international clientele as many financial education providers are only focused toward a particular nationality. This narrows the focus of their teaching and well as the student experience. This also bodes well for student experience as they get to consider diverse perspectives on the topic of money.

Reputation

This one’s a no-brainer. Especially on a topic as emotive as money, it’s essential the student is learning from a brand that is backed with a spotless reputation and mentors to model their thoughts and behaviors on.

Testimonials

Testimonials from students and parents give a fair idea of what to expect. It’s important that this repository is regularly added to. This ensures that the provider is consistently delivering an optimum outcome.

Independent media coverage

What is even more essential is to look at the independent media coverage the provider has gotten. It might be easy to fake testimonials on a website but really hard to constantly engineer positive press around their activities.

Resources

Resources like blogs, articles and publications should be available on the provider website, giving readers an understanding of their methodology. Having resources that are filled with waffle may warrant a deeper look into their credibility and effectiveness.

Partnerships

Partnering with reputed brands and organizations is another very good indication of a provider’s credibility and effectiveness. These organizations/ brands are very carful about the partnerships they enter into and easy to benefit from the due diligence they have conducted.

Trained educators

The program should be delivered by educators that have been trained not just in personal finance, but also in teaching this to teens in a way they find interesting and engaging.

Interactive web classes

Whereas there are a profuse number of financial education providers that offer pre-recorded programs, it’s helpful to think about the best way that teens learn. Teens learn best by discussing, debating and asking questions. Ideas and brain circuits come alive in conversation. This isn’t possible in a pre-recorded/ asynchronous program.

And while an asynchronous program might be more convenient, it cannot beat the accountability, peer interaction and mentorship that a live/ synchronous program offers. As Dr. David Rock states in his book Your Brain at Work, there are additional benefits to harnessing the power of social interactions.

There is a memory network that gets activated when information is social that turns out to be more robust than a memory without a social element. All that’s left is for you to do a bit of research and see which one fares best on these criteria.