Adulting 101: Basic Skills Courses for Millennials and Gen Z

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The rise of adulting courses has reached schools and private online education providers.

Adulting 101: Basic Skills Courses for Millennials and Gen Z
ILO Asia-Pacific / Skills Training, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Reading time 3 minutes
Reading Time: 3 minutes

These courses aim at millennials and Gen Zs looking to learn adult life skills, including sewing a button, finance, cooking, understanding modern art, and even healthy relationships.

Caitlin O’Kane of CBS News published a video report about online classes that teach basic life skills to millennials, aimed to develop life skills never taught to this generation. “Adulting” is a term adopted by young generations to refer to activities associated with adult life, covering basics such as taking care of personal finances, cooking, and becoming independent, among others.

Today, adulting classes are provided in school institutions or private online courses. Rachel Flehingen is the co-founder of the Adulting School” in Portland, Maine, USA. In 2018, it launched online classes aimed at millennials looking to learn various adult life skills, including sewing a button, understanding modern art, and even relating.

In the United States, action has been taken to prevent ignoring these skills by offering classes within high schools that fill in the gaps in life competencies while students are teenagers. In Kentucky, a high school has a day called “Adulting Day,” where senior students are dedicated to learning these skills. (WAVE)

Kim Callichio, a cooking class teacher, comments that while many people do not learn “adult” skills until their adult lives, learning late is better than never. She says she is always surprised that people do not know things as simple as “how to use a knife, or what flavors go together or can be combined.”

This lack of skills comes from a phenomenon known as “helicopter parenting” (or “hyper-parents”), where mothers and fathers concentrate all their attention on the education of their children just in academic fields, leaving other teachings and skills in the background. Due to classes, assignments, and extracurricular activities, students never have the time to learn about finances, household cleaning, or cooking. Thus, when the time comes to use everything they have been taught when beginning adult life, they feel ill-prepared to take this step.

In Mexico, there is a company that bears the same name of “Adulting,” which aims to teach personal finance to millennials and Generation Z, “since they say that these age groups usually have debts averaging 100 thousand pesos ($5,000) on credit cards and personal loans.” The company has around 55 thousand followers on Instagram, where they publish valuable content on these topics. In addition, they offer virtual workshops on subjects such as investments, taxes, and finance.

Liliana Olivares, CEO of Adulting.mx, comments that young people run into unfavorable financial problems in their adult lives because no one taught them how to manage money, and they make decisions without adequate guidance. “Part of the problem is generational. I think the parents of millennials were a generation that focused a lot on the present and giving their children everything at the moment. The parents themselves did not have or take the time to think about what was going to happen to their children in the future, much less to teach them to worry about their future, ” she told El Economista.

In addition, Olivares pointed out that 74% of young Mexicans have never had any course, guide, or advice on financial education. She describes their project model as “a financial planning methodology intended to address the specific problems of millennials and accompanied by continuous advice.” This methodology includes a personalized preliminary assessment, in which the particular need of each user is evaluated based on three main steps:

  1. Know where you are standing in your current situation and what you want.

  2. Collect and analyze information for an “x-ray” of the person’s consumption habits, income, and debts.

  3. Present a solution through three different plans.

Once the previous assessment has been made, the user can opt for three different plans, depending on their needs:

  1. Plan One-shot: This plan comes from the lifestyle study and is designed to get the user out of their debts and financial crisis in the short term. The company delivers a three-month plan, returning after that period to see if it worked.

  2. Life Goals: This plan is for when the user does not have much debt, and the focus is to achieve short-term goals, such as a trip or the down payment on a house.

  3. Full Service: This monthly plan is primarily for people who need continuous guidance. It takes care of everyday tasks such as payment reminders and paperwork and includes monthly sessions.

Besides sharing similar names and purposes, Initiatives like these promote early financial education. As a member of Generation Z, I can relate to the shared statistics because I have not received counseling either at school or in the family about how to handle my first salary wisely, what to report or not to SAT (the Mexican Tax Administration Service), and how to invest in my future. Thanks to people like Liliana Olivares and Rachel Flehingen, who allow us to learn from their mistakes and build better lives for ourselves based on our present decisions.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.


Fernanda Ibañez

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0