Get Tactical: Promote the Liberal Arts—NOW

Florida’s Governor Rick Scott rides again. Last year, he announced he didn’t believe in funding a liberal arts education, and now he’s done something about it. This morning’s New York Times reports that, in Florida’s state-funded schools, Governor Scott is substantially reducing the cost of four-year science/tech/engineering degrees. You know, then, what that does to the liberal arts degrees.

What do you want to bet this will get other like-minded leaders thinking the same thing? Here’s our chance to shrink liberal arts departments and sideline those expensive, luxurious majors that aren’t preparing people for actual jobs. Here’s our chance to feature vocational majors, the only majors worth pursuing in this economy.

Liberal arts faculty and leaders: this is getting away from you. If you believe that the liberal arts are relevant, that they are producing graduates capable of performing paying jobs, then do something about it!

Why Hiring Managers Dismiss the Liberal Arts

Let me remind you of a few things. The liberal arts prepare graduates to analyze, communicate, research, plan, and lead. Hiring managers are desperate to find people who can write, reason, manage qualitative information, distinguish fact from distortion, conduct research, and think systemically. Despite their urgent searching, employers seldom find candidates with these abilities because they’re looking in the wrong places. They’re looking to the professional schools rather than to the humanities and social sciences.

Why don’t hiring managers consider liberal arts grads? Because no one has told them what they’re missing. Liberal arts educators never get out in front of hiring managers—as their counterparts in business and engineering do—and say, “Look over here! Our students have what you’re looking for!” Nor are liberal arts educators telling their students what they can do with their humanities and social sciences education (aside from go to graduate school).

Let’s Get Tactical: Seven Steps

One way to approach this problem is to be circumspect and patient, to look for the relevant research—or to do some—to develop a plan in committee and attempt to carry it forward.

Another is to get tactical. I vote for that. Here’s what you need to do—now.

(1)        Create a “Liberal Arts Advantage” presence in your academic department. Your Liberal Arts Advantage will include:

A web page devoted to what you can do with a liberal arts degree (aside from teach, attend grad school, or work in a museum), including a handy online library of materials about the usefulness of the liberal arts.

Department-sponsored occasions where speakers come to talk with your students about the future usefulness of their education. There are plenty of successful humanities majors who would love to encourage students. Among those I’ve met at career events: a philosophy major who became a CIA director, a sociology major who became a wildly successful staffing entrepreneur, and a graphic arts/religious studies double major who became the marketing director for a huge, high-profile retail company. Imagine your students listening to what these speakers have to say about how their educations prepared them for their careers and their lives.

Evening get-togethers where local hiring managers come to your campus to meet your humanities and social sciences students. Ask Career Services to help your students get ready for these meetings.

(2)        Develop certificate programs exclusively for liberal arts students, in partnership with your campus’s professional development organization, if you have one. Examples: Business Writing for Writers, because it takes years to learn to write competently but not much time to learn to apply that ability to business. Business Analysis for Humanities Majors, about how to apply critical thinking and research to process and information analysis. Or the Fundamentals of Project Management. (Note: Business schools offer non-credit “communication” classes to their majors. Some even require attendance. Why can’t liberal arts offer non-credit business prep? Let’s bridge this gap in both directions!)

(3)        Bond with Career Services. Ask them to introduce you to hiring managers and human resources people they know in your geographic area. In your meeting with HR, ask the HR staffing representatives what would make them look twice at a liberal arts student’s resume. Take notes. You’re the one learning here. Use this information to fuel your creativity about how to help your students.

Also, encourage your liberal arts students to attend career fairs. Don’t assume those events are just for professional schools. They’re for people who want to put their educations to use in some meaningful way. Help them do that. How about sponsoring a session to help them pitch themselves to prospective hiring managers? Career Services stands ready to assist.

(4)        Develop a course called “Leadership in Literature” about how the study of literature prepares future leaders. Here’s your guidebook for preparing this course: Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature by Joseph Badaracco.

(5)        Write a speech for an audience of Human Resources professionals and hiring managers about how prepared liberal arts students are for lives of work and purpose. Then meet your audience. One way to do that is to connect with the Society for Human Resources Professionals. Pitch your speech to them, and offer to give it at one of their lunchtime meetings. (You won’t get paid for it. That’s not the point.)

(6)        Develop a brochure about what it means to be a liberal arts major—in practical terms. Send these, along with your personal letter of introduction, to local business leaders. (Note: Business people listen to academics. All you have to do is speak up.)

(7)        Make sure your Admissions department is ready with information about the relevance of the liberal arts. If they’re steering eager humanities prospects to lucrative vocational majors, and if they’re telling Mom and Dad about how long it’ll take English majors to pay off student loans, that won’t help this cause one bit.

There they are: seven tactical steps to demonstrate, and elevate, the relevance of the liberal arts to the standing they should have.

“But How Can I?”

Yes, it’s a lot of work. And of course it’s politically complicated. Maybe the School of Business won’t like it. Maybe funding is an obstacle. Sure, it’s challenging to make new connections outside your usual professional circle, not to mention the greater challenge of simply undertaking a new initiative.

I’m calling on your leadership abilities—resourcefulness, creativity, influence, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. The latter, in particular, should be a cakewalk when you’re doing the right thing. And you are.

The only thing I can think of to add is this: get moving. Governor Scott just went from strategic to tactical. It’s past time for you to do the same.

The Practical Liberal Arts

Hiring managers, well-meaning family members, and media pundits continue to assume the liberal arts are the educational breeding ground for the exploratory and artsy, producing graduates who have neither job skills nor job prospects. Instead of crisp technicians ready to crunch numbers and take home bonus pay, these misguided people think liberal arts majors are simply preparing for lifetimes of noble poverty.

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.

Writing in the “Real World”

For faculty and advisors:

When was the last time you told your liberal arts students that knowing how to develop a cogent essay is the best preparation in the world for business writing of all kinds?

Okay, maybe there’s a bit of hyperbole in there, but not much.

The fact is anyone who can write a decent essay is remarkably well-prepared to write many business documents—proposals, project plans, budget notes, status reports, process documentation, training materials, requests for proposal, business requirements, and much more.

Why is this true?

Business documents are almost always aimed at one of two goals:  they’re either informing their audience about something (training materials or status reports, for example) or persuading them of something (proposals, strategic analyses, or product evaluation results, for example).  Even the informative materials often become persuasive, as when a status report has to persuade the reader that being behind schedule or over budget is acceptable after all.

Therefore, here are a few things essays and business writing have in common:

The persuasive argument is the centerpiece of the work

Voice, diction, and structure matter

Fresh ideas beat tired ideas every time

Accountability for the information (e.g., citations) should be featured

Punctuation is not irrelevant (even though some business writers think it is)

While some persuasive arguments in business documents can be “lite” as in, say, web copy or marketing proposals where the net message is “buy mine,” it’s more often the case that the elements of persuasion put before business readers are (when they’re done effectively) rigorous and complex.  In documents and in presentations, writers and presenters are asking business audiences to adopt a new ways of doing things, accept change, internalize the particulars of a new plan, agree to head in a new direction, spend money here, cut funds there.  The list goes on and on.

It’s no wonder we hear so often how desperate operational managers are for people who can actually write.  Every job posting written in the last 30 years says that “excellent verbal and written communication skills are required,” but the truth is they’re rarely found.  If recruiters and hiring managers really made that a hard-and-fast requirement, they’d never hire anyone.

Unfortunately for them, they’re looking in the wrong place for these abilities.  But we know where they are.  Liberal arts students learn those “excellent verbal and written communication skills.”  Now all we have to do is just make the connection for the students:  Here’s how you can put those abilities to work!

The Liberal Arts? Don’t Bother

A few weeks ago, Florida’s Governor Rick Scott proposed cutting the funding for liberal arts programs in his state’s public universities.  His predictable argument, guaranteed to inflame those of us who know better, goes like this:  the only students worth hiring are science, technology and math grads; the liberal arts are frivolous.

 

Governor Scott isn’t the only one who thinks so.  Back in June, Bill Gates said roughly the same thing. In times of budget cuts, funding a liberal arts education doesn’t make sense.

 

On the other side of the argument, there are any number of articulate, impassioned liberal arts proponents describing the value of the education to society, business, and citizenship.  My own personal favorite is a TED talk in February of 2009 given by Dr. Elizabeth Coleman, President of Bennington College.

 

But I’m worried the Governor Scott perspective is gaining traction because on the surface his argument has a simplistic, practical appeal.  Job descriptions consistently ask for business or technical degrees.  No one, but no one, sees liberal arts grads as job-ready—even though they are.

 

What is to be done about that?

 

It’s one thing to point out, as Dr. Coleman does in her extraordinary speech, that the liberal arts produce the “broadest intellectual and deepest ethical potential,” but quite another to help the average guy envision how that potential translates into day-to-day business value.  Until we do that, until we let the liberal arts show off their practical use, they won’t shake their growing reputation as interesting but too luxurious for this day and age.  It’s why we rarely see business job descriptions that say “BA in history required” (except perhaps for a job as a museum curator), because the perception is that studying history is irrelevant in “the real world.”

 

But imagine for a moment a job description for, say, a Business Analyst or a Process Analyst that specifically lists among its requirements “B.A. in English, history, or philosophy preferred.”   Just imagine it!  And imagine this specification makes the list of required credentials because everyone who is anyone in the hiring business simply knows that humanities majors develop exceptional analytical skills.

 

Imagine for a moment a job description for, say, a Market Research Specialist that specifically lists among its requirements “B.A. or B.S. in the humanities or social sciences required” because the staffing person preparing this job description simply knows where to look for experienced researchers who are especially good at separating solid information from distortion and irrelevant detail.

 

Imagine it weren’t an uphill battle to explain the practical value of the liberal arts to every recruiter, every hiring manager, every parent, and every governor of Florida because it was already simply common knowledge that liberal arts grads are exceptionally well-prepared for jobs in business and, eventually, leadership—a revival, perhaps, of a popular opinion from times past.

 

One way to re-create a world where the liberal arts comprise a sought-after education is by instilling in students the idea that they’re becoming job- and leadership-ready.  It shouldn’t actually be hard to align liberal arts abilities with what businesses are seeking because business cares about only two things: increasing revenue and reducing expense.  It should be no secret (though apparently it is) that revenue improvements and expense reduction are directly linked to work performance in these areas:  analytical skills, competent writing and speaking, leadership abilities, research skills, managing qualitative information, planning and organizing, and creativity.  Look no further than the humanities and social sciences for people who can excel in all those areas.

 

If you think I’m suggesting compromising the education to achieve this—commercializing it or commoditizing it—I am not.  Leave the education exactly as it is, and simply make the connection between the education itself and how it can be put to use.

 

At the moment, the primary reason liberal arts students land jobs in business is because they are dogged enough to pursue opportunities, despite the stereotype about their prospects.  Career Centers, too, earnestly encourage liberal arts students to ignore what they hear and to believe they really are good enough to land paying jobs.  But a prevailing and credible voice in students’ lives, the people who actually teach the liberal arts and who know how useful it is, need to speak up more often.

 

“Yes, you will need to know how to write an essay in ‘the real world,’ and here’s why.”

 

“Yes, in ‘the real world’ you will need to know how to keep track of detailed information that’s somehow part of an amorphous blob you’ll be shaping into a cogent argument.”

 

“Yes, creativity and planning and public speaking are highly prized abilities in business, and you’re developing them.  Employers want people who can do what you are learning!”

 

If you do that, I’ll work on the hiring managers.

What Managers Want: Three Advantages for Liberal Arts Students

Recently, I attended a session where psychologist Ken Nowack talked about the ins and outs of management feedback at work.  Dr. Nowack’s research looks into how managers and supervisors who deliver feedback badly can actually cause physical harm to the employees they’re criticizing or advising.  Study after study proves that how feedback is delivered directly affects an employee’s performance, not to mention health, well-being, and outlook.  Pretty interesting.

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.

Liberal Arts “Skills”: What Are They?

In our culture, we believe that personal development is a matter of acquiring skills.  The more skills you acquire, the more capable you are.  We identify just about everything as a “skill”—basic motor skills, interpersonal skills, supervisory skills, negotiating skills, presentation skills, parenting skills, carpentry skills, sewing skills, culinary skills, social media skills. (Frankly, I think we overdo it.  Is everything really a skill?  Nonetheless, it’s a customary practice.)

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?  

The Liberal Arts and “Leadership”

 

We hear this over and over:  humanities and social sciences majors are developing what in today’s employment parlance are known as “leadership skills.”  This phrase describes a collection of characteristics and abilities that employers are desperate to find in both candidates and employees.

 

But the phrase is a little misleading.  That word—“leadership”—suggests being in charge.  Whom do we think of as the leadership people at work?  Quick assumptions might include the boss, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the management team, supervisors, and boards of directors.  That being the case, it seems odd to suggest that liberal arts grads, who aren’t ready to assume any of those jobs right out of college, are prepared for leadership.

 

So let me to clear this up:  Leadership is ubiquitous.  Leadership isn’t reserved for the executive or even supervisory ranks.  It can be everywhere, and the more people who demonstrate it—no matter what job they’re in—the healthier the work environment and the more successful the business.

 

Leadership in Action

 

What does leadership at work look like?  A couple of examples:

 

1 – People who can visualize what needs to be done next (on a project, for example) and can describe it to others.

 

2 – People who sign up to do what’s needed, who demonstrate initiative.  They say, “I’ll do that!”—and then they do.

 

3 – People who are relatively comfortable with ambiguity, e.g., conflicting priorities, changing interpretations of “the facts,” or inconsistent direction given by managers who simply forgot what they said last week.

 

4 – People who aren’t surprised by their colleagues’ strange behavior or by individuals’ or groups’ emotional reactions to everyday news and events on the job.  They understand something about human motivation.

 

5 – People who work well with others from different national cultures, not just that they’re pleasant and accepting of all nationalities, but that they understand the differences in communication, conventions, and social interaction and how that all plays out on the job.

 

These are just a few of many examples of what employers mean when they talk about “leadership skills.”

 

How the Liberal Arts Prepare Employees

 

I’m sure it’s obvious to you why liberal arts students are prepared in many of these ways, especially understanding national cultures and communicating well.  But let me elaborate about a couple of the other items on the list.

 

The first one—visualizing and describing work to be done—calls on imagination and communication.  When a project team gets together to talk, for example, about how a third party vendor isn’t making good on promises to deliver a tricky bit of software they said they’re “sure” they can create, what’s to be done?  Who will talk with whom? What do we think the issues really are? How will we document the conversation and what next steps should we plan for?  It takes imagination and an understanding of human behavior to think through all that, abilities developed in a liberal arts education.  It also calls on the abilities to write and speak clearly, to carry forward on the ideas and plans generated in the meeting.

 

The third one, about ambiguity, is something liberal arts students are much better prepared for than their counterparts in vocational majors.  Engineers and computer science majors, for example, specialize in determinism.  It’s either right or it’s not.  Somewhere down there it’s a math problem with one right answer.  That’s why they’re good at designing bridges, calculating satellite performance, determining load capacity.

 

But many situations in business aren’t like that at all.  They’re murky, conflicted, ever-changing.  Students who have studied culture, history, art, and language aren’t uncomfortable with situations where there can be more than one right answer, more than one #1 priority.  The liberal arts aren’t about correctly predicting an outcome—as business likes to and engineering must.

 

One last explanation about this list of “leadership skills,” the one about taking initiative.  If you’re wondering how liberal arts students are better prepared for that than vocationally-prepared students, it’s a reasonable question.  Here’s an answer you probably don’t expect:  Employees, who don’t have all the answers are more likely to take chances on work assignments than employees who do, or who at least think they’re very well-prepared for business employment.

 

Think about it:  Employees who can knock down complicated Excel spreadsheet analyses of departmental financials with one hand tied behind their backs, thanks to their business education, aren’t likely to volunteer to contact an under-performing vendor and find out what’s taking them so long.  Too far from their “expertise”!  Yet employees whose education has prepared them broadly as communicators, analysts, researchers, readers, and people who understand something about human behavior are likely to say “yes” to many opportunities—because they’re prepared.

 

Leaders, Not Bosses

 

Leaders aren’t bosses, or at least not always.  Leaders are everywhere, and the more of them we release to the workforce, the better.  We need to make sure liberal arts students understand what leadership in action looks like, and why they’re well-prepared to be the kinds of employees who aren’t afraid to tackle challenging work, who aren’t thrown by ambiguity or human motivation.  Because that’s what life on the job is really like.