CAS 2402: Transitions – From Campus to Career Success to Wealth Creation & Protection is a new Spring 2017 a course that teaches students how to navigate from campus to career to financial independence.
This course provides outcome-based life-skills in order to enhance ones’ career and path to financial freedom. Students will leave this course with:
- Career Plan of early strategy for employment an employability over time.
- Financial Plan for being smart with the money they earn and a path to their potential financial independence.
- Workbook that they can refer back to as a resource over the course of their career.
“Students are asked to visualize what they want from both their careers and their lives. From those outcomes, we teach them to reverse engineer to their current reality at Ohio University today. Then we have them chart a realistic plan to those goals,” said Alan J. McMillan, founder of LearnEarnRetire.
Alan J. McMillan
“We laden this with enhanced awareness that creates the motivation to get this right, early in their lives and career (including their campus years),” he continued. “We use the case study of the current Baby Boomers, on the doorstep of retirement, and discover what happened to them. Most wish they have been wiser with their money and started earlier to build their financial independence. Motivated by the lessons of the Boomers, we inspire them to do just that. And the great news is, if they begin immediately post-college, and make modest contributions in a conservative and well diversified way, they can dramatically enhance their chances of reaching financial freedom they are seeking.”
So what should today’s students focus on?
- Get a job.
- Thrive and advance.
- Replace it efficiently if need be.
- Be smart with one’s money.
- And have a path to financial freedom.
Lessons from the Boomers
Employment: A couple of generations ago the average American worker had one or two jobs. The department of labor estimates that the Boomers, the parents of the millennials, on average will have 10.7 jobs. Some estimate that the millennials will have around 17 jobs over the course of their lives. Jobs or roles within a company are two- to four-year stepping stones in the new economy. Students need both tactics and strategies to step wisely. CAS 2402 delivers on this need.
Financial: Since the advent of the 401k in 1978, companies have by and large abandoned pensions in lieu of employee self-managed defined contribution plans (usually in the form of a 401k). Those employees had little to no personal financial training.
How did the Boomers do?
- Of 46- to 64-year-olds, 60 percent have less than $25,000 saved or invested.
- The average amount in a 401k at retirement is three times their last year’s compensation, yet the experts say they need six to eight times.
- Research says only 46 percent of Americans spend less than they make.
- For 36 percent of people on Social Security, all they have is Social Security.
“The bottom line is that we did not teach critical skills to the Boomers, so they were forced to learn as they went,” McMillan said. “As we pass the baton to this next generation we can, we should, and we must do a better job of teaching them critical employment and economic skills to have a stronger and more certain outcome.”
About Alan McMillan
McMillan graduated from Ohio University with an associate’s degree in 1975. He spent 38 years in high tech sales and marketing, serving four times as a vice president of sales in Silicon Valley. He was on the senior management team twice where they took their company successfully into the public market.
Mid-career, he attended MIT where he became an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow earning his master’s. He retired from high-tech and founded LearnEarnRetire, which lead him to speak and publish to 18- to 20-something.
He is qualified to teach this class because he made a lot of mistakes professionally and financially and from those, and research, developed materials to give Millennials great advantage. He has done four major job searches in his career and in the process became good at it. He joined the senior team at Hocking College to turn enrollment around, is retained by Syracuse University Athletics to teach life skills to athletes, publishes at LearnEarnRetire, and other prominent sites.
On this journey, McMillan has presented this material to more than 10,000 students live. Their support and feedback has fueled his passion for this mission.
About the Course
This course illuminates a path that can lead from campus, to career success, to financial independence. The twentysomething years are highly consequential and in particular one can gain huge advantage by managing the move from campus to career economics. Students learn both the pitfalls and advantages by their post campus decisions as they navigate this critical inflection point. It begins with leveraging the campus years to become highly employable, while bettering one’s odds at multiple job offers by graduation. It moves into thriving in your new role. With the volatility of the workplace, it covers how to replace that role efficiently if need be (either by voluntary or involuntary job loss). We teach techniques on how a prepare for inevitable economic shocks (recession or unexpected disruption of employment). Then we illustrate how to be smart with the money one makes, while building a plan to financial independence over time, that the student clearly understands.
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