Industry & Enterprise
Humanities-based skills and knowledge are essential to a wide range of professions, helping to shape trends and drive innovation. As creativity, persuasion, and communication continue to top the lists of employers’ most highly sought-after skills, these stories highlight the impact of a humanities education for successful teams and industry leadership.
Where can hiring managers find employees who can free-think, innovate, adapt and change to multiple-occurring business challenges, provide stellar customer service while also leading satisfied teams of employees in a global economy?
How can businesses find employees who can connect with others, foster relationships that transfer to business success and profits while supporting employee and customer satisfaction?
If you said through an MBA program, through STEM degrees or through technology-based degrees, you would only be half right.
They hire humanities graduates.
Yes, the humanities—the non-STEM, non-science, not-engineering-and-tech majors from English, history, the arts, economics, philosophy, and related scholarly studies, to name a few. They hire the men and women who pundits and comics have painted into the proverbial minimum-wage-job corner by saying “Do you want fries with that burger?”
When we agree with the thought process that humanities majors have no place in business and are not as valuable as STEM graduates, then we devalue the human person and the need for employees at all levels to be able to work together and respect each other, especially in today’s global and ever-diverse economy. When only so many web developer jobs are needed, there are dozens, maybe hundreds more, that will require the creative thinking that the humanities graduates bring to the workplace--the writers, artists, graphic designers, presenters, advertisers and promoters--humanities majors who know how to think, how to solve problems and how to innovate and lead.
A vital economy needs the different perspectives that humanities majors bring to the workplace where their innovation and interpersonal acumen help to build stronger companies, stellar organizations and high-quality products and services.