"The American job market is undergoing a major transformation. Liberal arts majors have more opportunities. People need to keep refining their skills to keep up with a rapidly changing marketplace."
-- Jonathan N. Grayer, President & CEO, Kaplan, and Richard M. Smith, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, Newsweek, A Guide to Careers 2000; Careers 2000.
"The United States is entering a new golden age of generalists: integrators of information, motivators of people, communicators of ideas. A world in which "even philosophy majors can get a job," says Mitchell Fromstein, CEO of Manpower Inc. ("provided," he adds quickly, "they have some kind of exposure to [computer] technology"). This trend has been gathering force ever since the 1970s, when evidence began to accumulate of the mess that narrowly trained specialists had made of the American economy.
In today's job market, there is a premium on intangible qualities such as leadership, flexibility, and the capacity for abstract thought. The other stuff can be taught by employers.
Generalists have core skills that you can leverage throughout the organization, innate qualities of problem solving, leadership, adaptability for change."
-- Jerry Adler & Seema Nayyar, Help! I Majored in Beer; Careers 2000.
Gregory Giangrande, author of The Liberal Arts Advantage, says, "While we have experienced breathtaking technological and industrial developments, corporations are now also competing in a global marketplace Corporations require employees who are generalists rather than specialists, who can cultivate complex relationships that will help them to compete. According to Fortune, nearly 1/3 of all CEOs majored in Liberal Arts."
-- Barbra Lewis, Living in La-La Land? What to do with that Liberal Arts degree; http://www.careerbuilder.com.
"More than any other curriculum, the liberal arts train people to think critically about concepts and society, look at the big picture, and analyze cause and effect relationships, break an idea or situation into component parts and put it back together again," says Robert Goodward, Director of Publications, Why Hire Humanities Graduates?, Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.
"Many high-tech positions require no formal technical training at entry level The industry needs well-educated people to fill these non-technical positions, because without them, technology can't get out of the labs and into the market. Outside of pure development positions in hardware and software, the majority of industry jobs don't require a technical degree.
The high-tech industry is fast-moving, exciting and fun. And it pays very well. High-tech companies need liberal arts graduates. Fundamental skills necessary for succeeding in this industry are excellence in communication, including listening, writing and speaking. Employees have to be flexible, quick-witted and creative to meet the daily challenges of work. People with degrees in history, English, theology, urban planning, fine arts and the performing arts end up becoming marketing managers, sales representatives and product marketing managers."
-- William A. Schaffer, High-Tech Companies Need Liberal-Arts Grads, Yahoo! Careers; http://careers.yahoo.com.
"The business-services firm of Pricewater-houseCoopers, which will hire 14,000 new college graduates this year, 80 percent of them with business degrees, is also "extremely interested in hiring liberal-arts students," says Brent C. Inman, the partner responsible for domestic recruiting and personnel."
-- Adler & Nayyar, Help! I Majored in Beer; Careers 2000.
"American Management Systems Inc. (AMS), a Fairfax, VA- based consulting firm, is planning to hire more than 800 graduates to work in information-technology consulting positions AMS is more likely to consider students whose majors are "liberal arts-like" and who want to be involved in the technical arena, says Allan Jones, the firm's manager of college recruiting.
Computer-related professions are expected to be the fastest-growing job group through 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, technology increasingly is the backbone of many of business processes. Recruiters seeking technical hires are now courting business and liberal arts majors."
-- Valerie Patterson, associate editor of the National Business Employment Weekly, New Grads Enjoy Record Job Market; http://careers.wsj.com.
"As a generalist, a liberal arts major is well suited for a variety of jobs Some of the many accessible fields of work available to liberal arts grads are banking, retailing, insurance, real estate, computer programming, systems analysis, radio-TV journalism, film production, travel, public relations, personnel work, human services, fund-raising, politics, government at all levels, advertising, and marketing research."
-- The Liberal Arts Job Search; http://riceinfo.rice.edu/projects.