Hard Skills and Self-Discovery
After she read “Be Ambitious,” Kelie (our Director of Talent Acquisition) responded with an article about “squiggly” careers. This is the idea, named by authors Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis, that the best career paths are non-linear because they lead to rounder development and greater possibilities. A decade back, then Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made a similar argument, but used the analogy that you should think of your career path like a jungle gym, where you can climb anywhere, rather than a ladder, where you can only climb the next step up.
Broadly, I agree with this thinking and have tried to live it.
What’s interesting, though, is that all of this opining on the importance of de-regimenting career paths comes at a time when it seems to be the case that college students are more likely to pick majors that would put them on a more regimented career path. For example, here are the five college majors that gained the most market share over the past 20 years:
The major with the most market share remains business, at 18.9%, but that’s down more than 2% from 20 years ago.
As for which majors have lost the most share, aside from business, it’s education (-4.7%), social sciences and history (-3.1%), English (-2.6%), and liberal arts (-1.2%). As an English major who graduated from a liberal arts college, I weep for our future. (You can find the data here.)
Not really; I’m an optimist when it comes to things like economic growth and development. Moreover, and at the risk of generalizing, I don’t think this seeming inversion in trends (humanities majors happy to be on stable career paths versus hard skills majors who pine for self-discovery) means we are as different now from then as we might think (despite all of the shade different generations like to throw at one another).
Rather, I think it’s the case that people want to be both well-rounded and successful. Perhaps in the past, when college was less expensive, there was less pressure to learn a marketable trade because you could find structure in your career. Now that it’s more expensive, I know many feel the pressure to graduate into a career path. Yet just because someone learned to code doesn’t mean that that person isn’t also interested in people and philosophy. Except for the software developers we all know who have no interest in people or philosophy.
Yep, we know who you are.
– By Tim Hanson