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.

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?  

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.

“We call this our ‘breathing week,’” she said, with relief.  Aaaah, yes.  Breathe in, breathe out.

Then what?  Start planning for fall!

How will you inspire your liberal arts students next fall?  How are you planning to deliver the message to first year students that choosing the liberal arts is not only a great idea but also practical?

How about reaching those sophomores, who are starting to get some pressure from Mom and Dad to switch Marketing or Accounting, “where the jobs are”?  Or seniors, who are ready to draft a resume and need to translate their education into business-friendly terms?

What exciting plans do you have to help faculty appreciate—even more than usual—the relevance of their subjects to the demands of the business world today?

Allow me to share a few ideas.   Invite me to your campus!

If I Hadn’t Majored in English, I’d Never Have Made it In Management is a one-hour keynote address for university leadership and faculty, revealing how the liberal arts prepare students for jobs in business and leadership. Find out more about the three things liberal arts students offer that employers are desperate to find in their workforce today!

Nothing Prepares You for Leadership Like the Liberal Arts is a one-hour keynote speech for any liberal arts student who has wondered whether there’s truth to the rumor that their post-college career prospects are limited to publishing, non-profits, teaching and fast-food service.  (They’re not.)

Business Resumes for Liberal Arts Students is a four-hour workshop for humanities and social sciences students that covers:  how to build a resume from scratch; how to translate humanities and social sciences knowledge and experience into business terms.  Students also learn to write “objectives” and “summaries” that not only represent liberal arts abilities but also get noticed!

Business Writing for Writers, a workshop for students who already know how to write, teaching them to apply their writing ability to business “deliverables”—proposals, requirements documents, budget notes, status reports, organizational communication and more.  Sessions arranged to meet your schedule.  Maximum: 20 students.

Small group presentations/discussion groups with faculty.  Example:  Discussion with the English department to talk about how literature informs business leadership.  Or meeting with humanities faculty to talk about how being a better writer actually helps businesses save money.

I’m happy to customize programs to meet specific needs.  Tell me about your challenges and let’s design a program that works for you.

How to get started:

Call 323-246-9040

Email susan@liberalartsadvantage.com

Visit www.LiberalArtsAdvantage.com

I have two answers to that question:

1)       There’s never been a time in history we have needed educated, ethical business leadership more than we do now, and the place to find those abilities is among liberal arts grads.  The ability to think critically, write well, read between the lines and understand human behavior aren’t just “nice-to-haves” in business.  They’re critical.   

2)         We must put intention into action.  Or—with apologies to Nike—“Just do it!” 

Much research has been done about the relevance and importance of the liberal arts, how specialized vocational education will leave us bereft of creativity, strategic thinking, cultural competence, and adaptability in our workforce.  It’s time to move beyond the persuasive argument, and take action.  Let’s get liberal arts students ready for employment opportunities. Let’s get in front of Human Resources recruiters and tell them what “skills” to hire.  Let’s direct liberal arts grads into utilities, finance, hospitality, technology, transportation, retail, insurance, and government—where they are very much needed.

That’s why I do what I do.  Because we need it and it’s time.

If you agree and you’d like help making these things happen on your campus, call me (503.730.8642), email me (susan@LiberalArtsAdvantage.com), and visit www.LiberalArtsAdvantage.com.

            At Whittier College last week, Director of Career Planning and Internships Linda Ross told me a scary story, the kind of story I can picture liberal arts students sharing around a campfire after all the marshmallows are roasted.  It goes like this:

            Fifty graduate students at a nearby university, pursuing master’s degrees in something like “Student Affairs,” came to visit Whittier to learn about campus life at a small liberal arts college.  As a level-setting introductory question, Linda asked the 50 students how many of them knew what the liberal arts were.  Only four raised their hands.

            “I majored in the humanities,” one said.  “Isn’t that one of them?”

            I don’t know about you, but that story scared me, and it obviously grabbed Linda’s attention.

            “I think the problem,” Linda concluded, “is that people need a better awareness of what the liberal arts are!”

            Indeed.

            Whittier College is good training territory for the confused grad students, because it’s “very dedicated to the essence of the liberal arts,” as Linda describes it, teaching students to see things from various perspectives and to deepen their understanding of events, relationships, culture.  A Whittier graduate earns a bachelor’s in the liberal arts, not in English, history, sociology or math, but in the liberal arts.  Yes, they major in something (including a design-your-own major, offered by just a few schools), but the degree is in the liberal arts.

            All the more reason to make sure students “understand the value they bring to organizations,” Linda says.  “Our students are highly trainable” for a variety of jobs, but persuading recruiters—whom she describes as “narrowly focused”—how valuable this is is a challenge. 

            You have to wonder why hard-working students steeped in a vigorous curriculum are such a hard sell.  Who wouldn’t want an employee who’s learned to think, argue, write, calculate, create and remember?  How many entry-level jobs are there—really—that an exceptionally educated young person couldn’t learn to do pretty quickly?

            In the meantime, Linda advises “You must have practical experience” to offer along with the exceptional education.  Internships—an obvious choice—and any part-time work experience will help recruiters envision the potential. Towards this end, many departments at Whittier develop internships, ways of applying the academic learning to practical post-collegiate opportunities.  They also have a long history of offering “paired classes” as well, classes which cross disciplines (for example, something like cultural studies and economics) to prepare students to bring together and use what they’ve learned in real-world situations.

            Fortunately, the liberal arts education often (usually) pays off in the long run.  It’s the short run that poses the immediate problem.  As Jonathan Veitch, President of Occidental College, said not long ago, “A liberal arts education is a slow boat to a better job.”

            The idea of a slow boat on a long voyage may seem like an unaffordable luxury if you find yourself staring down a sizeable student loan balance.  But being prepared for the variety of challenges, thanks to the rigorous preparation of a liberal arts education, will position you for income-generating opportunities for decades to come. 

            And if there are 50 graduate students wandering around the LA area who don’t get it, and who-knows-how-many recruiters who aren’t sure either, that’s all the more reason those of us who DO get it aren’t shy.  Liberal arts students are better prepared to work, think, analyze, plan, organize and lead than students pursuing any other kind of education or major. 

            There.  I said it.

If there’s one thing people at work struggle with perhaps more than any other, it’s navigating the emotional terrain on the job.  If you haven’t worked in business you may, from a distance, think of the workplace as a left-brained, logical sort of place, where experienced employees perform repeatable tasks and conform to efficient processes, all to produce a neatly designed outcome.  Occasional smiles over lunch, occasional minor misunderstandings with the boss, and at the end of the organized dispassionate work day, they leave the office and become human again.

It isn’t like that.  Companies are hotbeds of emotional activity.  Competition, insecurity, frustration, excitement, anger, enthusiasm, fear—all of it operating in the workplace every day, affecting decisions, progress and revenue.  Managers who don’t recognize the emotional realities on the job, who don’t take emotions into account when making decisions, often live to regret it.  The more emotionally tone-deaf among them make the same mistakes over and over, often creating miserable work environments and dysfunctional teams.

What does that have to do with being a student of the humanities and social sciences?  I think plenty.

Recently, I met with Kenton Hill, who is the author of Smart Isn’t Enough, a book about emotional intelligence at work.  In the book, Mr. Hill shares with us stories of six executives, all of whom struggle because they lack emotional awareness, empathy, the ability to inspire others, be better collaborators, etc., often with far-reaching and terrible, sometimes calamitous, consequences.  Mr. Hill is a “work performance coach.” In other words, he’s hired by companies to work with specific individuals, often in critical positions in the company, to help them become more effective leaders, usually by addressing some aspect of emotional intelligence that’s clearly lacking. 

I met with him because I wanted to know if he’d given any thought to whether studying the liberal arts better prepares us to be more “emotionally intelligent” than studying, say, something more vocationally focused (engineering, business). 

His answer?  In a word, “yes.”  He talked first about social awareness, an emotional intelligence category that includes empathy, organizational awareness and the ability to “read” relationships.  “When you’re reading fiction,” he observed, “you’re often putting yourself in that character you’re reading about, comparing yourself to the character, and it helps us see things from others’ viewpoints.”  After a moment he added, “And studying about other cultures improves your awareness of your own culture.”

Emotional intelligence is rather a hot buzzword in business circles, especially in management, because of the growing awareness that emotions have a lot to do with success, and by that I mean business success.  Yes, it has something to do with personal success, too, of course, but businesses aren’t especially interested in that.  They’re after revenue, innovation, progress, beating the competition.  How being emotionally intelligent serves all that—that’s what they’re interested in!

One thing Mr. Hill does as he engages with clients is he performs assessments of them through initial interviews and eventually through more complex reviews of their performance at work.  Looking through his files, he commented that the person who had scored the all-time highest in emotional intelligence of all his clients was a history major!

That could be a coincidence, of course.  But I bet it’s not.  What makes us able to recognize emotional realities, to anticipate reactions, to understand team dynamics, and to collaborate are the insights and information that come to us from the arts, philosophy, studying culture, history, and human behavior.  

From studying business?  Not so much.

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.