Well Beyond the Basics: Business Skills Development

The further they advance through the adult curriculum, the more students recognize how their skills connect and transfer. They also recognize how skills and knowledge are cumulative, laying foundations for and building upon one another. All of their adult education curricula could qualify as “business skills development,” because students’ acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills empowers their workplace advancement. At the curriculum’s more advanced levels, however, the curriculum focuses more and more on language and mathematics skills specifically required in business. For example, business skills development courses focus on reading, analyzing, interpreting, and responding to business texts. Writing for business stands as its own discourse domain, different and distinct from all others, so that business skills development works only with business discourse. Similarly, at its higher levels, business skills development focuses on all the mathematical operations shown on spreadsheets, and it emphasizes analysis of and inference from statistics.