Preparing your next generation with career skills

It’s simple math: As your family grows, more people will share its wealth. This means that to sustain affluence, younger family members need to grow not just as stewards, but also as wealth generators themselves.

Adding wealth creator to the role of wealth sustainer requires not just financial literacy, but wealth literacy. To nurture this, our Center for Family Legacy (CFL) focuses on six core areas of learning. One of them, personal and professional development, educates the next generation on careers, entrepreneurship, and leadership, and provides them with a strong foundation for success—which can help sustain wealth across generations.

“We work with many in the next generation who want to create something for themselves says Emily Haenselman, director of family education at the CFL. “They want to succeed and differentiate themselves from their parents.”

Haenselman and her teammates educate the next generation on personal and professional development through lessons, coaching, and activities. They customize learning plans based on the goals of the family and the next-gen participants. Here’s more about how your family can benefit in three areas.

Career development: From purpose to job goals

Career development often begins with articulating personal purpose, which can clarify career goal setting.

Of course, the goals of next-gen participants don’t always match the path of the previous generation, says Drew Egan, director of family education at the CFL. So their career development isn’t simply preparing them to take over the family business or to follow in the family’s footsteps. It’s setting them up for success and helping them express their differences no matter what path they take.

“Often, in finding your purpose and thinking about your vision, you may come up with ideas that are distinct and different from your current family business and that can grow into something larger,” Egan says. “We educate next-gen family members on how to pursue their purpose and their passions. What’s most fulfilling to them is where they’ll likely be the most successful and will help build family wealth.”

We customize the CFL’s career education program to each participant, and include topics such as resume building, networking, interviewing, signing up for benefits, and coping with rejection. Other discussions include establishing short-, mid-, and long-term career goals and planning the steps to achieve them.

Career development education begins much earlier than high school or college, says Ashley Silvers, a next-gen education associate at the CFL.

“We start working with kids as young as 8,” Silvers says. Topics for younger next-gen participants include skills assessments, college prep, and entrepreneurship. “We get them thinking about their talents and the needs in their community, and connecting the two.”

Entrepreneurship: A natural next step

A family’s wealth can help fuel many passions in its younger members, and a discussion about entrepreneurism often arises during career development programs.

“A lot of conversations lead naturally to entrepreneurship because we start foundationally with purpose and values,” Silvers says. “When they start talking about their strengths and what they care about, it naturally leads to what they could do if they wanted to start a business or nonprofit.”

For younger members of the client families that Silvers works with, their entrepreneurial spirit might lead to field trips, where they can learn more about fundraising and keeping the enterprise running successfully. For older next-gen participants, the CFL educates them on what goes into starting a business.

“We help them think about building a business plan,” Egan says. “Who will their investors be? Their competitors? What makes their business different?” Some participants have even created the company that began with their business plan.

While the rising generation’s interests may look different from the previous generation’s, the shared value of entrepreneurship can show family members what they have in common. And when family members feel connected to their shared values and one another, they’re more likely to be engaged in furthering the family’s legacy.

Leadership: The intersection of personal and professional development

Entrepreneurship doesn’t always lead to creating a new business. The same is true for leadership development, which can be career-focused or cover how to lead the family, Egan says.

“We help young people identify what leadership means to them,” he says. “For many, their leadership purpose is to help the family stay close to one another: to communicate well, to handle conflict, and to manage the ways that money affects family relationships so they can sustain the wealth long-term.”

The CFL has created a three-part leadership development series for the next generation. The first phase defines what leadership means to participants and what an effective leader looks like to them. Participants are also introduced to the Truist Leadership Institute’s model of beliefs, behaviors, and results. In the second phase, participants learn how to work through some of the common challenges leaders face Egan says. The third phase is defining leadership purpose and what participants hope to accomplish through their leadership.

“Creating that leadership purpose statement is very important,” Egan says. “They can refer back to it in terms of how they act, who they are, and who they want to be as a leader within their family.”

It’s important to remember that personal and professional development is just one area of wealth literacy, Haenselman says. Education in every area can help successfully sustain wealth.

“Statistically, it’s hard to preserve and grow wealth across generations,” Haenselman says. “Helping the next generation prepare for successful careers, develop entrepreneurial skills, and build leadership skills all combine to help generate wealth.”