But the truth is liberal arts students are ready to take on paying jobs and make a difference.

In fact, they’re especially well prepared for jobs in business. Why? Because they’ve  learned to think, reason, analyze, decide, discern, and evaluate–the kinds of abilities business hiring managers are DESPERATE to find.

But humanities and social sciences students get precious little encouragement to present themselves to business hiring managers as viable prospects for paying jobs. I think that’s because there hasn’t been enough lively thinking done about how to apply the practical liberal arts to the everyday needs of business.

So how do we get the point across? I suggest we stop trying to explain it in great detail and instead introduce a new phrase into the everyday job-seeking dialogue of liberal arts students. The new phrase: the practical liberal arts.

And here they are, the “practical” liberal arts:

Writing

Speaking

Reading between the lines

Analytical skills

Planning and organizing

Managing qualitative information

Cultural literacy

Leadership

Emotional intelligence

Research

Systemic thinking

Foreign language proficiency

Those are the abilities employers want their workforce to have! And where better to learn them than by studying the humanities and social sciences?

Now, the next step is helping prospective employers—and students—understand how to apply the practical liberal arts to actual work. A couple of examples:

Analytical skills – business analysis; project administration; file management; process analysis.

Planning and organizing – project lead role; strategic planning; budget planning and documentation.

Research – market research; data quality management; competitive research.

Speaking – presentation preparation; sales presentations; corporate or client training.

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

The liberal arts are practical only if we think about and describe the ways in which we practice them.

Another thing Dr. Nowack said—sort of as an “aside” in the midst of his information—is that managers assess an employee’s performance in three dimensions.  These three dimensions, it occurred to me, can tell liberal arts students a lot about how to “sell” themselves to prospective employers.  And they are:

1.         Technical competence.  How well does the employee know and perform the nuts and bolts of the job?

2.         Bottom-line results.  What direct contributions to the revenue, or what direct reductions to expense, does the employee make?

3.         What is this employee’s “burr in the saddle” effect?  In other words, how much trouble does he or she cause?  And “How much damage control am I as a manager, or others on my team, having to do as a result of the trouble?”

Liberal arts students entering the job market will have to be prepared to be evaluated in all three ways: technical competence, bottom-line results, and burr-in-the-saddle effect.

Technical competence is a harder “sell” for liberal arts majors who haven’t spent their academic careers elbow-deep in spreadsheets or examining the intricacies of supply chain management.  But most entry level jobs don’t really take long to learn.  The advantage liberal arts students have (if they’ve been paying attention in class) is they know how to learn.  Students who demonstrate they’re quick to pick up the most complex of ideas, systems, or processes can persuade employers they’re worth hiring.

Bottom-line results—now those are actually much easier.  Liberal arts abilities reduce wasted company expense because important written material is easier to understand.  Less time wasted re-reading unfathomable text or puzzling over convoluted, dense presentations is time spent more productively. It isn’t money you can take to the bank, but the time saved offsets lost opportunity.

And finally, the burr in the saddle.  I don’t for a moment think liberal arts students are less trouble than students from any other academic disciplines.  But I do think liberal arts students are more likely to anticipate the effects of antics, disputes, poorly worded messages, contentious meetings or badly delivered presentations. All of that will help to minimize the burr-in-the-saddle effects.

If those are the hard truths of employer evaluation—and I’m sure they are—then students need to present their abilities in the context of all three:  how they’re technically adept, expense-saving employees who would never put anything under a horse’s saddle that shouldn’t be there.

Job descriptions, of course, always list specific skills under job requirements.  Regardless of whether the position is entry-level or senior executive, under requirements for the position you’ll find specific skills.

Liberal arts students, if you’re entering and crisscrossing the hiring fray you must, therefore, be able to identify the skills you’ve developed.  Hiring managers and recruiters may (probably) have no idea what skills liberal arts students have.

What are they, these “skills” that liberal arts students have that employers want?  They are:

Analysis – the ability to examine a situation or problem from many angles; compare and contrast events, facts, ideas, opinions;  assemble elements of research and develop an answer or argument from them; assemble facts meaningfully, using logic and reasoning.

Communication – the ability to organize ideas, facts, information into a logical flow; create clear, efficient messages and documents; write things that are readable, not dense and clunky (as so much of business writing is today!); aim the information at the audience.

Cultural literacy and foreign language proficiency – the ability to understand the ways in which cultures are different and how that’s reflected in levels of formality, expected behavior between generations and genders, the pace of activity, and many other ways that affect how business is conducted.

Emotional intelligence – the ability to understand human motivation, how individuals and groups behave, to be emotionally aware of oneself, and to use emotions in decision-making.

Leadership – a broad area, but briefly – the ability to visualize what needs to be done and can describe it to others;  the willingness to sign up to do what’s needed, demonstrate initiative, say, “I’ll do that!”—and then they do it, with integrity and intention.

Managing qualitative information – identifying, categorizing, tracking, and retrieving things like documents, diagrams, and maintaining the associations between them.

Planning and organizing – the ability to envision and manage a unit of work in the future, to anticipate events, including risks and contingencies, to recognize interdependencies, track progress, and to estimate timeframes.

Research –  to examine new business ideas, assess the competition, develop plans, understand laws and regulations, study customers (marketing research), investigate causes of problems, keep abreast of technology—and more.

Systemic thinking – the ability to see situations or problems as a collection of interconnected, interdependent parts, and be able to recognize or anticipate what will happen when one part changes, its effect on the rest.

Each and every one of these skills contributes to business goals, either by improving revenue or reducing expense. Those are, of course, the two things that matter to business: making money and saving money.

Which of these skills are you good at?  

Thanks to the blogs I write for liberal arts students (this one and “For English Majors”), I also hear from a lot of liberal arts students, especially students in the humanities, who approach their futures differently.  While they like the subject matter they’re steeped in—French, philosophy, history, American literature—many are quite despondent about their professional futures.  Here’s a re-cap of what they tell me:

“I don’t really know what to do after I graduate.”

“Everyone asks me if I’m going to teach.  Teaching is fine, but is that the only thing I can do with my degree?”

“After I graduate, I should probably just take time off because there are no jobs and I’m not really prepared for any paying jobs anyway—except maybe cashiering or retail or something like that.”

“My roommate is a business major.  He has a resume, and he got a lot of help from his department to put his together.  No one in my department ever talks about resumes.”

“I can’t believe how many people tell me I should look into a career in publishing.  How many jobs can there be in an industry that’s going all online anyway, and in which there were never very many jobs in the first place?”

Is this really what our broadly, richly, liberally educated students think of their future prospects?

Admittedly this is only my experience and not a broad, in-depth analysis of current student conditions and mindsets.  But I see and hear this difference every term:  eager confident business students who see themselves as ready to launch; capable, thoughtful humanities students who need someone to show them where the launchpad is.

I enjoy helping business students become better writers and better speakers.  I want to do more to help liberal arts students get just how much they have to offer–and that includes helping their faculty and advisors know just what valuable professional people they’ve helped to create, what launchpads their students are prepared to climb onto with confidence.

I hear from humanities and social sciences graduates every year at this time who tell me they have no plans to attend any of these events.

“I’m a history major.  Employers aren’t looking for me.”

“I’m embarrassed to tell these people I majored in anthropology.  They look at me like ‘What were you thinking?’”

I also hear this:

“There are never any companies there in industries I’ve been told to pursue—publishing, the arts, schools, non-profits, museums.  They don’t go to career fairs, so I don’t either.”

I’m assuming the reason non-profits and the like don’t make the career fair scene is they’re not invited or, as in the case of publishing and the arts, the number of available job openings at any one time is miniscule.  No point in making the career day scene just to represent the one position that’s open at the moment for which thousands of applicants are already expected.

But let’s talk about that other problem, the no-one-is-looking-for-me problem.

You probably spent most of your years in higher education never realizing the powerful influence of one particular force helping to determine what’s important to your education.  One group, answering that one looming question:  How do you prepare yourself for post-collegiate independence, contribution, and success?  Now that you’re about to graduate, perhaps you’d like to know who’s determining the answers to those questions.  Are you ready?  Human Resources recruiting and staffing departments.  They’re the people who (1) write job descriptions, (2) set the parameters on online application systems and (3) screen incoming applicants.

 Human Resources recruiters have re-prioritized academic priorities in the minds of many students—not to mention their parents, advisors, some administrators and certainly the media (and by that I mean “pundits” analyzing college grads’  prospects for the future).  Now, if you asked HR folks if they meant to re-shape higher ed, I’m sure they’d say “no.”  But the scramble for secure,  high-paying jobs, combined with the narrow assumption that Business, Engineering and Computer Science are the only majors producing useful “skills,” has put HR in the awkward position of re-defining how universities should be educating students.

If that doesn’t seem right to you, you’re not alone. 

So back to the job fairs, the “Career Days,” on your campus.  Instead of letting HR staffing people tell you what they think they’re looking for, you tell them.  If you know you can write, think, reason and research, if you know you’re creative, focused, analytical and astute, tell them that!  Tell them that the workforce of the future needs to be resilient and broadly educated to be prepared to roll with change and to lead.  Tell them the workforce of the future must do more than optimize production and re-calculate financials to accommodate re-interpretations of accounting rules. 

Imagine walking up to a recruiter at a job fair and saying this:

“We’re in the midst of a changing, very difficult economy.  Not just the economy but you might even say the world order!  I know that’s a huge challenge for businesses.  It’s why I’d like to find a position where I can apply what I know about world culture, language, and team behavior, where I can use my analytical abilities to help your company manage qualitative information, where I can assist with research because I’m an expert at discerning fact from distortion.  Those are the skills I believe the workforce of the future really needs, and my education in <history, English, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, etc.> has prepared me in all those ways.”

Try it.  What’s the worst that can happen?  A recruiter gets a new outlook on life.  You get the satisfaction of having a recruiter take a second look at you.  You nudge the universe slightly in a better direction.  You develop one amazing “elevator speech” which you will heretofore always have at the ready. 

Who knows?  You might even land a job.

          My youngest brother is a firefighter.  Or I guess I have to say now he was a firefighter.  The department recently forced him to resign. It’s complicated, and I’m not going into the reasons here because they’re not the point.

          “I’ve been a firefighter my whole life,” he said to me on the phone the other day, still reeling after his recent separation from a job he loved and worked at for 22 years.

          He was a firefighter even before he really was one—that is, from the time he was a teenager, he worked as a volunteer for the county, assisting in any way they’d let him, learning from everything he saw and did.  He learned to fight structure fires, save lives, respond to emergencies, and that became his life’s work.

          It’s rare to find one’s calling as early in life as he did, to be drawn to a specific line of work and to embark on what turns out to be a long career at such an early age.  (He was 23.)  I admire him—always have—and I’m sure that when the shock wears off, he’ll be doing good work in the world again.

          One thing not entirely in his favor as embarks on the next phase of his professional life is that he’s a specialist, vocationally prepared for a very specific job.  Like many who went after a particular, specialized line of work, he’s under-prepared for this moment.  So are human resource specialists who majored in Human Resources and accountants who majored in Accounting and a marketing manager who majored in Marketing.

          We’re told these days to prepare for a couple of career changes during our lifetimes.  Not just job change, organizational change or changing of the guard but to be ready to change our careers, to overhaul our professional lives.  More people are facing that today than probably ever before after losing their jobs, watching their companies go under or leave the country.  Who’s going to be ready to rally?  People who are broadly educated, who can apply communication and analytical abilities to a variety of opportunities.  People who are curious and active learners.  People who study the humanities and social sciences.

          Working life is getting longer in the U.S., where retirement is already an old-fashioned notion.  I don’t know anyone who plans to work ‘til 65 and then take up gardening, living comfortably on a modest but adequate pension.  There’s far too much uncertainty for that sort of plan.  Not only are pension funds few and far between, but social security is always in the crosshairs of some political shotgun, and I don’t know about you but my 401K has been for quite a ride in the last few years.

          That being the case, we’ll all be working longer than we were perhaps planning to, so the prospect of changing careers may be appealing.  Who wants to be an HR Specialist for 50 years?  But if you graduate college as one, what else are you?

          I know liberal arts students worry about their immediate job prospects.  They tell me that all the time. But the long-term prospects are much better for those whose education prepare them for many challenges rather than just one.

One thing everyone in business will agree is in universally short supply:  Time.  Increased competition drives the pace of business.  That, combined with the need to get more work done with fewer people—especially in an era when lay-offs are just “business as usual”—is transforming time into a resource of inestimable value.  Business people are double- and triple-booked for meetings regularly and, since we’re still waiting for cloning technology to be perfected, it means they miss meetings they should be in and so try to play catch-up later.  Email has run amok—no one is ever caught up—and the media continually grinds into us that faster is better and anything less than super multi-tasking at extreme rev is, well, lame.

The pressure of running endlessly short on time forces a lot of compromise, like scanning emails rather than reading them, nodding in agreement when you’re not really sure what you heard.  But who has time to be sure?  It’s a bit like knocking down an energy drink when you know what you really need is a good night’s sleep.  Eight hours under the covers or a five-minute Red Bull recharge?  Shortcuts are the norm!

What does this have to do with whether hiring managers “get it”?  and by that I mean whether they understand they’re overlooking a rich, well-educated pool of applicants when they say things like “Business degree required” on every single job description they approve.  Why do they do that?  Because they believe they’ll be adding to their ranks people who can hit the ground running, who—with a minimal amount of preparation—can crunch some numbers, wiggle some technology, make something happen.

To say the least, they’re impatient.  Time constraints drive short-sighted decision-making, and this is just another example.  No time to consider whether our standard criteria deserve a fresh look.  Just slap “Business degree required” on it, and maybe “MBA preferred,” just for good measure. 

Yet many of these same hiring managers know that some of the important abilities they hope to find (leadership potential, communication skills, systemic/critical thinking) come from academic disciplines like the humanities and social sciences.  They know it—I know they do—but changing the standard business-degree-required approach would take time (“You want to hire a what?” their manager asks in astonishment), not to mention the additional ramp-up required for a successful candidate who hadn’t been launched quite as first-day-job-ready as his business school counterpart.

Nope, no time for all that, since time (as we mentioned) is precious.  Pop another Red Bull instead and deal with the consequences later—consequences that include a workforce heavy on spreadsheets and technology, light on analytical ability, dialectical thinking and communication skills.

So, do hiring managers “get it”?  I think many do.  But the idea of convincing others and changing the standard operating hiring practices … that’s more time and energy than they’re willing to spend.

That means it’s up to you to demonstrate your value, recognizing you may indeed have a receptive audience among many hiring managers.  Think about how what you do will add value, cut cost, improve efficiency and maybe even save time.*  And don’t be shy about it.

Remember:  Your subtext is “Here’s why you should hire me instead of a business major” and theirs is “Why should I hire you instead of a business major?”  Should make it easy to keep the conversation on track.  As long as you don’t lose sight of the essential element holding them back from hiring you:  The time impact.

* Detailed descriptions of how liberal arts majors add value in business as well as cut cost, improve efficiency and save time can be found elsewhere on this blog, also at http://www.ForEnglishMajors.wordpress.com.)

            “That’s nice, dear.  What is it?”

            You fall silent, at some level unwilling to say what you know you must, and what you know will trigger an avalanche of reaction.  Nonetheless, you did decide it was time to tell them.  After several awkward seconds, your mother smiles at you inquisitively.

            “And what will you be majoring in?” she prods.

            “Um, well, African History.”

            Your dad looks up from his laptop.

            “What the hell do you want to do with a degree in African History?” he snarls.

            “I want to study the cultures and geography of countries in Africa.  I think it’s not very well understood by the rest of the world, and–”

            Knowing what’s coming, your mother has already left the room. 

            “You need to get a job when you graduate!   You think they’re hiring a lot of African historians these days?  Go look at Monster.com.  See how many jobs there are for African historian.  I bet you don’t find one!”

            “I bet I don’t either,” you admit.

            “You’re not spending the rest of your life living under this roof just because you got a useless degree.  You want me to pay for your education?  Choose a different major.  Like business.  Or how about engineering?”

            “I’ve never been interested in math.  Or very good at it either.”

            “Okay, then, something else.  How about healthcare?  You could be a nurse.”

            Your mother has returned.

            “Oh, Jim, not all those bedpans and bodily fluids.  Really.”

            “Alright,” Jim agrees, “no bodily fluids.  But no African history, either.  If you’re so wildly interested in it, take a couple of elective courses in it.  Just don’t tell anyone.”

            You knew this was a conversation you were dreading, and all that you imagined has now come to pass.

            “I assume we have an understanding,” your father concludes, returning his gaze to his laptop screen.

            I understand you, you think to yourself, but you don’t understand me. 

            Truth is, neither of you seems to understand one very important thing:  Majoring in history (or social sciences or literature or language) is incredibly good preparation for many of the jobs on Monster.com and all the other sites.  No, you won’t find much for “African historian” other than a few teaching jobs. (I just checked.)  But you will find all kinds of jobs that want you to know how to:

            Write

            Research

            Organize qualitative information

            Apply systems thinking (“critical thinking”)

            Speak

            What you need to tell Mom and Dad is that an education in history prepares you to think reason, write, and lead.  Employers are desperate to find these skills in the workforce, and thanks to your education, you’ll have them.  Professional education (business, nursing, engineering) is creating an army of niche-filling job-specific workers.  We need some of those.  But what business really needs is people who can think, learn, communicate, analyze and discern the difference between appearance and reality. 

            There are jobs for just such people, and they go by the name of project assistant, business analyst, market researcher, documentation specialist.  You WILL find those jobs on Monster.com.  Be sure you tell that to Dad when he insists the only employable people come from professional schools.

            And if that doesn’t work, tell him to call me.

            “I’m a history major with an interest in Renaissance art,” you say.  “My senior thesis is about the influence of the social climate in Italy on the work of DaVinci.”

            That may be technically correct, but if you were wondering whether you’d lost your hiring managers at “I’m a history major,” you are correct.  You did.

            I know what you’re thinking:  “But I AM a history major.  What am I supposed to do?  Lie?”

            Of course not.  But don’t say what you’re majoring in.  Say what you know.

            Let’s rewind.  She asks you to summarize your qualifications.  You say:

            “I have excellent verbal and written communication skills, thanks to years of learning to write and speak in school.  I’m also an experienced analyst—researching, organizing, re-shaping and presenting qualitative information.  My education has prepared me for this.  It’s the kind of work we do in the liberal arts.”

            Now you’re stepping out of the elevator and she’s intrigued!  You go into her office and have a seat.

            “I see here you majored in history,” she says, scanning your resume.

            “Yes.  One thing I realized fairly recently about studying history is that it equips you with great job skills.  We invest significant time in developing our analytical abilities and communication skills.  Beyond that, we study culture, which I believe is an important thing in business, to have an understanding of the behaviors and expectations of people from many parts of the world…given that this is a global economy.”

            She’s probably speechless by now.

            Now would be the time to add to your liberal arts mix.  Do you speak any foreign languages?  People who don’t are often surprised to learn that speaking a language requires understanding the culture where the language is spoken.  Play this up!

            Have you traveled?  While you were whever you were, how did your education help you, and what did you notice?  Particularly if you observed something about commerce wherever you were.

            “I spent several months in Germany.  Their idea of customer service is very different from ours.  At first it bothered me, but later I realized it’s a cultural difference, not an attitude.  My German, by the way, is great thanks to that experience.”

            It probably goes without saying that if you have studied about regions of the world that are emerging as economic powers (China, India), don’t keep that to yourself!

            So save the part about the Italian Renaissance for later.  Once she’s convinced you have relevant experience, you can bring up DaVinci and his social context.  Then it’ll make you look smart and more interesting.  But if you pull this trigger prematurely, you may just seem quirky and under-prepared to take on a paying job.