Liberal Arts or Humanities students often get asked about what they wish to pursue in their respective careers. It is often wrongly assumed there are very few career choices after this. Yet a cursory glance at today’s requirements clearly confirms that not only is it a highly sought after a vocation, indeed people with knowledge of such fields actually have an edge in the digital age. In the past it was assumed that to get a job in the tech industry, one had to be from one of the STEM fields. Now a lot of previously difficult tasks can be done using online tools such as programming from Git Hub. While economists often underestimate cultural factors behind decision making, humanities grads have deep insights on human nature and a resultant empathy. Reading literature helps people in understand specifics as opposed to others treating people as mere abstractions. A management consulting expert has written the book Sense-making where he has illustrated the importance of understanding people to gain a foothold in the market. That explains why a lot of organizations such as Airbnb, Facebook, Alibaba, Slack and YouTube were founded by Liberal Arts majors. Ultimately Inter-disciplinary studies can only be beneficial for businesses and larger human problems.

Source:https://hbr.org/2017/07/liberal-arts-in-the-data-age

Uploaded Date:21 October 2017