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Summary
Summary
In a tech-dominated world, the most needed degrees are the most surprising: the liberal arts
Did you take the right classes in college? Will your major help you get the right job offers? For more than a decade, the national spotlight has focused on science and engineering as the only reliable choice for finding a successful post-grad career. Our destinies have been reduced to a caricature: learn to write computer code or end up behind a counter, pouring coffee. Quietly, though, a different path to success has been taking shape. In You Can Do Anything , George Anders explains the remarkable power of a liberal arts education - and the ways it can open the door to thousands of cutting-edge jobs every week.
The key insight: curiosity, creativity, and empathy aren't unruly traits that must be reined in. You can be yourself, as an English major, and thrive in sales. You can segue from anthropology into the booming new field of user research; from classics into management consulting, and from philosophy into high-stakes investing. At any stage of your career, you can bring a humanist's grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future. And if you know how to attack the job market, your opportunities will be vast.
In this book, you will learn why resume-writing is fading in importance and why telling your story is taking its place. You will learn how to create jobs that don't exist yet, and to translate your campus achievements into a new style of expression that will make employers' eyes light up. You will discover why people who start in eccentric first jobs - and then make their own luck - so often race ahead of peers whose post-college hunt focuses only on security and starting pay. You will be ready for anything.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
An argument for the usefulness of a major in liberal arts.Forbes contributor Anders (The Rare Find: How Great Talent Stands Out, 2011, etc.) offers encouraging advice for students worried about choosing a college, a major, or finding a job after graduation. In a "rapidly evolving high-tech future," he writes, there will be "thousands of openings a week" for graduates who majored in subjects such as philosophy, anthropology, or English. These humanities and social science majors are the people businesses want to hire, Anders maintains, for their intellectual curiosity, creativity, empathy, critical thinking skills, and ability to write. These are the qualities, argues the author persuasively, that are hallmarks of the liberal arts. Like most self-help books, this one is rolled out in short, pithy chapters filled with jaunty anecdotes about successful job hunters who managed to apply their education to a "new category of jobs" that require new abilities: "to read the roomand to get different people on the same page"; to handle ambiguity and use ingenuity to solve problems; and to "inform, entertain or inspire." Anders unpacks the idea of critical thinking, central to the liberal arts, by highlighting the various skills that critical thinking entails: interpreting controversial topics, for example, filtering and distilling information, and being comfortable with "non-linear thinking." The jobs that the author sees arising all connect to technology: market research, which depends on online surveys; recruiting and career coaching, which use giant databases to find candidates; fundraising, which depends on technology "to go prospecting for donations" and mount online campaigns; digital designers; and project managers. Anders acknowledges that these technology jobs may require learning new skills, but he believes that liberal arts majors have "the enthusiasm and temperament to prevail in uncharted domains." Campus career centers, he cautions, may not have caught up with the multiplicity of new opportunities, but many, he has found, have begun "career-friendly initiatives." Anders ends with a step-by-step protocol for getting jobs that can lead to a satisfying career. Useful guidance for newly minted job hunters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Philosophy and anthropology students take heart. The same skills you learned in classroom debates and complex text analysis can lead to high-paying jobs, according to Forbes contributing-writer Anders. Unlike a degree in computer science or engineering, a liberal-arts degree teaches students to question assumptions, face ambiguity, and use teamwork, all skills that are useful in the ever-changing job environment. Anders claims that there is a growing need for people able to bridge the gap between the tech-savvy and the tech-floundering. He follows a number of liberal-arts majors whose meandering work paths have led to major successes. He profiles companies as different as IBM and Pinterest to show how applicants who can solve problems and build teams, and who have had a variety of experiences, can land top jobs. Anders offers tips for presenting these qualifications in ways that will spark interest in companies, and he encourages older workers to broaden their search scope. Give this to anyone who is questioning the value of a classical education in today's fast-paced world.--Smith, Candace Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SURELY ONE DAY the ability to interface directly with the nanomachinery connected to our brains will render computer science as we know it obsolete. When experts start arguing for its continued relevance, undergraduates choosing a major will begin to realize that the obscure art of manually punching arcane symbols into keyboards is no longer a safe bet. At the present moment, however, it is only liberal arts majors who have to wonder whether all of the articles and books promoting the marketability of their chosen discipline should make them more or less uneasy about the future. Two additions to this growing field have appeared just in time to try to soothe the post-graduation panic that some within the class of 2017 may be experiencing: George Anders's "You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a 'Useless' Liberal Arts Education" and Randall Stress's "A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees." According to both Anders and Stress, the ever-expanding tech sector is now producing career opportunities in fields - project management, recruitment, human relations, branding, data analysis, market research, design, fund-raising and sourcing, to name some - that specifically require the skills taught in the humanities. To thrive in these areas, one must be able to communicate effectively, read subtle social and emotional cues, make persuasive arguments, adapt quickly to fluid environments, interpret new forms of information while translating them into a compelling narrative and anticipate obstacles and opportunities before they arise. Programs like English or history represent better preparation, the two authors argue, for the demands of the newly emerging "rapport sector" than vocationally oriented disciplines like engineering or finance. Though it does not automatically land one in a particular career, training in the humanities, when pitched correctly, will ultimately lead to gainful and fulfilling employment. Indeed, by the time they reach what Stress terms the "peak earning ages," 56-60, liberal arts majors earn on average $2,000 more per year than those with pre-professional degrees (if advanced degrees in both categories are included). While "You Can Do Anything" and "A Practical Education" supply useful talking points in support of the financial viability of studying the liberal arts, they may arouse more fear than hope. Both feature myriad anecdotes of job searches, all with happy endings, but the journey there invariably proves daunting, circuitous and chancy. Moreover, the reality that apparently favors liberal arts majors is precisely what makes the current job market so forbidding: extreme precariousness. Trained to be flexible and adaptable, these students are well equipped, according to Anders, to navigate an unstable job market, where companies, fields and sometimes whole industries rise and fall at a nauseating clip, where automation is rendering once coveted skills redundant and where provisional short-term jobs, freelance assignments, part-time gigs, unpaid internships and self-employment are replacing longterm, full-time salaried positions that include rights and benefits protected by unions. While Anders, a contributing writer at Forbes magazine, clearly wants the best for recent liberal arts graduates, his pep talk often consists of rebranding the treacherous market conditions of the 21st century as part of a thrilling new frontier. Instability can promote "quirky-job-hopping" and greater "autonomy." Recent liberal arts graduates who find these conditions less than inviting, Anders says, simply need to discover the proper spirit of adventure - the same spirit that led them to their chosen field of study. But somehow it seems unlikely that his analogy to whitewater rafting will get them excited to send out yet another batch of cover letters and resumes. The two books also raise hard questions about who exactly can turn a liberal arts degree into a successful career. In almost all of the stories, job candidates must survive a significant lag time before finding a position that pays the bills, during which they are often forced to pursue additional training or accept poorly compensated work while relying on financial support from their parents. Moreover, in just about every case, they end up tapping into an extensive network of family and friends. Ominously, Stress, a professor of business at San Jose State University, chooses to restrict his study to Stanford graduates in order to ensure that he has a sufficient number of success stories. And even these individuals end up struggling along the way. How much harder must it be for those with fewer connections and with B.A.s from less prestigious schools? No wonder first-generation, working-class and foreign students are so often drawn to technology and business majors, which appear to provide a more direct line between credentials earned and career opportunities secured. When Anders observes that Etsy wants employees who can "banter about Jenny Holzer's conceptual artwork and turn theory into praxis," this sounds like code for people who can speak the language of privilege. It is possible, of course, for a B.A. in the liberal arts to help working-class students acquire the cultural fluency that generally develops out of being raised amid the affluent and the highly educated, but it also seems likely that an elite background, not a degree in theater or art history, is the most reliable gateway into the career fields Anders is plugging. Anders does cite a 2015 study indicating that students with liberal arts degrees from lower-ranked schools entered the tech sector at only a slightly reduced rate compared with students from highly ranked schools (7.5 percent to 9.9 percent). But his summary does not indicate exactly what jobs these different types of students got or what they were paid, and Anders himself admits that extra career guidance may be necessary to help students at second-tier universities make their liberal arts education work for them in the way he thinks it should. Advocates of the liberal arts will maintain that the intellectual experiences fostered in these disciplines ought to be available to everyone. If the trust-fund kids don't have to weigh the practicality of studying feminist philosophy when registering for classes, why should the scholarship students? Moreover many academics dismiss the now widespread tendency to assess fields of study in terms of their marketability, viewing it as a sign of the American university's capitulation to a corporatist, neoliberal ideology. The goal of the liberal arts, they would say, is to impart knowledge, promote the capacity for serious intellectual inquiry and encourage critical perspectives on prevailing norms and assumptions, whether or not such training attracts prospective employers. But then what professors don't want their students to getgood jobs after college, particularly those saddled with debts accrued to pay their tuition? Indeed, in the face of what looks like permanent budget austerity within higher education, the future of many humanities disciplines probably depends on their perceived ability to open doors to professional opportunities. Thus true believers in liberal arts degrees may find themselves rejecting the criteria that Anders and Stress use to assert their value and viability while secretly, desperately hoping that the two authors' prognosis is correct. Job searches may have happy endings, but the journey can be daunting, circuitous and chancy.
Library Journal Review
Anders (contributing writer, Forbes; Perfect Enough), who is clearly passionate about the value of a liberal arts education, describes the career paths of dozens of men and women who parlayed their humanities education into personally and financially rewarding careers. Supplementing anecdotal evidence with research findings, he reveals that humanities majors' long-term salaries and career satisfaction exceed those of graduates of "vocationally oriented" programs of study. The success stories demonstrate that liberal arts majors' career paths are often unconventional and nonlinear. The author also provides examples of businesses, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies that make a practice of hiring liberal arts majors, as well as fields for which such students are ideally suited, including market research, social media, fundraising, and project management. Throughout, Anders convincingly demonstrates how savvy liberal arts majors can chart a course to a rewarding career. VERDICT This book deserves a broad readership of university faculty, administrators, and career personnel, as well as recruiters, hiring managers, and liberal arts majors (and their parents).-Alan Farber, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.