TRIPLE E TRAINING HOLDINGS

Project management skills challenge students’ command of language and math. Developing their ability to forecast and manage resources, time, and money, students frequently must translate words to numbers and numbers to words. All the separate project management skills are inter-related, and all of them build on students’ ability to see patterns and trends, solve for x, and develop timelines, work lists, and detailed instructions. Project management skills support a manager’s complex juggling act, helping him control costs, motivate people, satisfy clients, meet demanding schedules and stay sane. In South Africa’s system of adult education, experiential learning drives students’ success at every stage of the curriculum, but it takes on extra urgency as students practice project management skills. Theory and practice don’t always align, so students must use their entire repertoire of problem-solving skills, working with numbers and learning the subtle language of negotiation.

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.