Making the Liberal Arts Degree Pay Off

I was recently thumbing through a copy of "The Key Reporter," the official newsletter of Phi Beta Kappa. It was an honor for me to be inducted into the honor society my junior year, the very same day I had the privelege of shaking hands with President Bill Clinton.

This is a great article, written by Nick Corcodilos, which I will reproduce here. I think it is good advice for those still seeking employment in today's challenging job market.

Enjoy!

Making the Liberal Arts Degree Pay Off
By Nick Corcodilos

I confess: I was a liberal arts major and it has helped my career.
I once worked for a CEO who couldn't write well, but he knew enough to surround himself with people who could. His success rested to a large extent on his team's ability to communicate his great ideas effectively. When I applied for this job, my liberal arts education gave me an edge over other job candidates who couldn't write to save their lives. The simple ability to communicate well can give you an edge, too.

The door has opened.
As the world of online commerce expands and the scarcity of talented technical and business professionals becomes painfully evident, employers are turning to a relatively untapped pool of job candidates: liberal arts majors. These are the people who majored in subjects like English, art, history, ssychology ... you know: the non-business disciplines.
While employers are welcoming them, liberal arts majors — whether they're fresh out of school, or whether they have years of experience in non-business jobs — too often stumble all over themselves trying to figure out how to present their "qualifications" for jobs they might never have considered before.

More than they realize, people with liberal arts backgrounds have readily identifiable skills that can be directly applied to solve business problems in Internet-related businesses including new media, e-commerce, enterprise planning and software development. But, here's the challenge: few employers will help job hunters figure out how to transfer those skills.

Walk into a new mindset.
If you have a liberal arts background and have never applied it to business, it's up to you to figure it out for yourself. And that means getting out of the academic mindset. You need to shake the attitude that your education limits your options, because your success in fact depends on shoe-horning, forcing, pounding and otherwise mapping your skills to the jobs you want.

I started my college career as an English major. When I realized English majors were a dime a dozen, I switched to psychology. (Psych majors were about a quarter a dozen — I wasn't thinking very "big" at the time.) How did I make it in headhunting? The ability to grasp a problem, research and develop alternative solutions, and make a clear, effective presentation won me my first job and has served me well for over twenty years. I didn't need business experience to acquire these skills, but I did need to learn how to apply them in business.
Your advantage is that with a liberal arts degree, you possess many fundamental skills and attributes that your competition may lack.

Skills:
Defining problems and tasks.
Mastery of information retrieval systems (libraries, books, periodicals, Internet, personal interviews).
Planning and executing research.
Organizing ideas and solutions.
Writing and communicating.
And perhaps most important, a well-honed ability to learn what you need to in order to accomplish a task.

Attributes:
An open mind to new ideas and approaches.
Disciplined work habits.
A critical eye and ear.
These fundamentals can be applied to business. In fact, they're important advantages in the business world — however, they're useless unless you know what to do with them.

Re-map yourself.
What intimidates liberal arts majors is their lack of detailed knowledge about the problems and challenges the business world faces. Upon attaining that knowledge, any smart person with the skills listed above can proceed to map her skills to the work and create a compelling presentation to win a great job.

In a nutshell, here's what a liberal arts major needs to do to prepare for a business job.
Select a business you want to work in.
Study it in excruciating detail. (There is no way around this if you want to succeed.)
Learn enough so you can begin mapping the aforementioned skills to the business.
Sound simplistic? It's the same approach you take to create a painting, write a term paper or conduct an experiment. Follow these three steps (I didn't say they were easy), and you will be on your way. Ignore these steps, and you will be at the mercy of the "random resume, random job" process that dominates most job searches.

Get started.
The purpose of this article isn't to walk you through the re-mapping you must do. It's to make you start thinking about the key challenge you face: to take responsibility for figuring out how your abilities can be used to solve an employer's problems. Don't wait for an employer to figure it out for you — he won't.Outline your thoughts about this re-mapping. There's no need to get it perfect. Once you have started in this new direction, you'll be ready for the job search methods that are introduced in The Basics and covered in more detail in the book, Ask The Headhunter. For a personal perspective, please see Liberal Arts Is Slang for Job Skills. Few businesses are so complicated that it is impossible to figure out where you would fit within them. But, few job hunters are diligent enough to do the exercise and preparation that yields the job. Want to know more? Go to Ask the Headhunter or write to mail@asktheheadhunter.com. Nick Corcodilos (ΦBK, Rutgers University, 1977) is a syndicated columnist and host of “Ask the Headhunter: The Insider’s Edge on Job Search and Hiring” located at www.asktheheadhunter.com. His iconoclastic techniques for job search, hiring and career development are used by job hunters and employers alike.

The Ballad of Demolition Dave

Currently I am helping to write a children's book in my free time. One excercise attempts to teach children the meaning of the word "crash."

I penned this little ditty which makes me smile. I hope you enjoy it.

-Gary

The Ballad of Demolition Dave

There once was a driver who earned lots of cash,
In Demolition Derbies, many cars he did crash.

His amazing moves made the audience gulp,
as he smashed rival fenders into mangled steel pulp!

One day he was challenged by Sideswipe Sue.
"Dave, I'm coming to crash into you!"

In the championship theirs were the last cars left.
Dave drove east, Sue went west.

Turning around they drove straight at each other,
going the scary speed of 100 miles per hour.

The cars came together in an amazing crash!
When the dust cleared, both cars were trashed.

The audience gasped, Dave and Sue were nowhere to be found....

They were both up in heaven, on clouds looking down.

Quote

Many centuries ago, in his funeral oration to the citizens of Athens, Pericles declared:

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others."

Being Part of Something Special

Looking for work is always a challenging, trying time, especially when nobody seems to be hiring. Lately I've had the fortune of being able to see the silver lining that comes with a long job search, and I'm able to really appreciate what's important in life. I've got plenty of food, a great family who loves me and supports me, good friends and fantastic health. So why be glum? There just isn't anything to be gained by being depressed.

More than anything, my continual emphasis on the positive has really motivated me to start thinking about what I'd really like to do with my life, and who I'd like to work for. More than anything else, I'd really like to be a part of a big family - one that works in harmony towards fulfilling the same corporate goals and achievements. It sounds a bit silly, but I keep thinking back to the analogy of Star Trek's Enterprise - a place where everyone works in harmony with one another, and where everyone is an expert at what they do. It is because of this seamless, selfless environment that the ship escapes out of precarious predicaments, driving ever onwards towards greater and greater discoveries.

I have really strong interests in the computer gaming and medical device industries. "Making the Liberal Arts Degree Pay Off," an article in The Key Reporter, Phi Beta Kappa's quarterly newsletter, offered some good advice by stating that in order to be successful, one should focus on the industries one wants to work in and study them in excruciating detail. Therefore, I'm really studying a lot about both, in hopes of someday being able to find a dream job. One such dream job would be to have a position at Blizzard Entertainment, in Irvine.

First, I have to thank the Orange County Register for broadcasting how great it is to work for Blizzard, arguably one of the most successful gaming studios in the world. Now that the word's out, finding a great job there just went from "insanely impossible" to "be sure to apply again during your next Earthly incarnation." I won't stop giving up though!

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/employees-blizzard-company-2373930-sams-work

I often ride my bike past Blizzard's large iron gates, pausing to stare at the campus' many buildings. Doing so makes me sympathise with the great literary hero Charlie Bucket, who often stared through the fence of the Wonka Factory, dreaming of what it's like to be one of the privileged few inside. To work for Blizzard, I'd practically give up everything. As long as I could mop the company's floors for minimum wage, I think I'd be euphorically happy. Sadly, my resume is that of a professional marketing specialist and copywriter, and I'm often overlooked for the company's small, important ground-floor positions such as customer service associate or quality assurance tester. If I could just get the opportunity to prove myself and work my way up to great things, it would be a dream come true.

A Thought About Social Networking

In my recent job hunt, I've had the pleasure of meeting lots of great, professional people. Mixing it up at social events, job fairs and interviews has introduced me to wonderful folks I probably never would've had the pleasure of chatting up anywhere else.

One thing I've learned is that everyone is insistent on jumping aboard the social networking train, which calls to mind a saying espoused by Spider-Man.

"With great power comes great responsibility."

After much tweaking of my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles recently, I began to think that these sites everyone perceives as so great are both beneficial and destructive in equal measure. They open doors for you by putting your name out there in front of the people making hiring decisions. They also put your thoughts, feelings and personal interests out in the open for scrutiny and judgment.

It's quite chilling when you think about it. How many people have been in situations where an e-mail has been misinterpreted or misunderstood, only because the offended party was not present to hear the vocal tone or inflection of the writer? Now we are all opening ourselves up for all to see, with not only our personal predilections out in the open, but our thoughts and feelings as well.

It is true that now we are at the mercy of a great tide - the Internet. All we can do is use our gift of common sense and police ourselves as best we can. But who doesn't think twice about who may be offended these days before clicking "publish post" or "tweet?" It's even scary to think that one must educate their children at age 10 to be careful about what kind of information, thoughts or personal opinions they put out there. All a prospective employer has to see is, "Partied all night at Roscoe's," before tossing a resume into the garbage, but do they stop to think if the post was made 15 years ago, when the applicant was a high school student? Who knows how long the stuff we post will linger out there? Why should erroneous posts made in the heat of passion or as a fun-loving teenager live on into perpetuity to compromise one's chances of earning an honest living?

I'm not down on social networking by any means. I just like to think and ruminate about all sides of the equation. How many great future musicians have been lost to time, now that the Internet has all but destroyed music sales? Nobody mourns what will never come to pass, but perhaps they should. Unfortunately we repeat the pattern of ruining things first and longing for what once was, before trying to rebuild ala The Lorax.

Best of luck to all who find themselves looking for work, and remember to use social networking carefully and responsibly!

Thoughts on Entertainment Software Association Newsletter

Today I was enjoying my latest update from the Entertainment Software Association, and I was surprised to see a piece about my home state of Massachusetts becoming a home base to computer game studios.

For years I'd always imagined sunny California was the place to be if you were a game designer, but apparently this is changing. A possible factor could be the high cost of doing business in California. Massachusetts has always been noted for encouraging and nurturing new industries.

Off the top of my head I know Curt Schilling (of Red Sox fame) founded his own gaming studio in Maynard - 38 Studios. What's even more impressive is that they've acquired Big Huge Games! Pretty impressive, and I'm anxious to see what the future holds for them, especially in terms of their planned MMORPG release.

Computer gaming contributes more than $2 billion to the Massachusetts state economy, a pretty significant sum when you think about it. The sector is growing too, with a 20% increase in jobs seen to be on the horizon.

Something to keep in mind, if you want a career in the gaming industry, and the seafood isn't bad either!

Welcome to My Blog

Welcome to my blog! I'm currently exploring the vast world of social networking websites, as I've clearly noticed employers looking closely to see if people are up on their Twitter skills.

Currently, I'm trying to link this blog to my LinkedIn page, which is why I'm typing this quick entry.

When I have something more substantial to say, I'll be back.

-G