Employers Seek Liberal Arts Skills
Employers value the broad analytical and communication skills young adults acquire through a liberal arts education. Recruiters look closely at the way prospective employees approach work situations. They look for the ability to:
- work through multi-faceted problems
- organize complex information into coherent categories or manageable steps
- pinpoint key or underlying issues
- solve problems creatively, challenging "business as usual"
- work hard to meet high professional standards
- recognize the dynamics, culture or issues that could affect a group or relationship
- adapt easily to changing situations or environments
And the candidates who are best able to communicate their qualifications during the brief interview are the most likely to land the job.
Loren Pope has been writing about education since 1952. In his book, Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That’s Right For You, Pope discusses a study AT&T conducted in the late 1980s to find out if liberal arts graduates could survive in the huge technical corporation.
While only 10% of AT&T’s employees have liberal arts degrees, 43% of those with liberal arts degrees had achieved at least the fourth level of management. Only 23% of the engineers had progressed as far.
Pope quotes AT&T spokesman Burke Stinson, "we discovered that in the managing of a business, the liberal arts people were not wedded to a particular idea or approach; they were open, they were more creative. A linear manager would try to fit a problem into a specific box. The engineer felt comfortable with a small group of likes, but when he expanded his scope, his comfort dropped. The nonlinear executive did a better job of communicating. The engineer was more militaristic; the nonlinear executive was more receptive."
"The future is to the creative, the leap-taker. An engineering company is no longer limited to engineers. It is influenced by what happens today in Korea or Konigsberg. It is very different from the old days," Stinson said.
