Liberal Arts degrees are more valuable for Tech’s knowledge work than ever before.
The 2010s saw unprecedented growth in the Tech industry with millions of new jobs created outside of engineering teams. People with Bachelor of Arts degrees have filled the majority of these new jobs dispelling the myth of poor career prospects. Today, the technology industry thrives on the creative skills of arts majors. As labour demands change, workers with people-focused pedagogies and are skilled across all forms of communication are unsurprisingly better prepared to keep up with tech’s dynamism.
With the pandemic recession ravaging economies and labour markets across the world, it is difficult to imagine long-term labour trends. Tech companies may be tempted to retrench workers deemed to be replaceable and hanging onto pricey engineers. Not even tech’s “family” or “sports team can save staff from perilous job cuts. However, it would be a big mistake for companies to deem creative or knowledge workers as dispensable or non-essential. In fact, such skills will be crucial in the pandemic recovery; new strategies and risk-taking will define surviving companies. When markets rebound and political trade powers reorientate, demand for sales, logistics, customer relations and legal frameworks labour will return. College students with a cultivated consistent work ethic can confidently pursue a Bachelor of Arts without questioning its place in technology’s challenging future.
Education: a company entrance exam?
My work experience in the South African tech industry revealed the lifeblood of the company were the arsenal of knowledge workers, professionals and other skilled people outside of the product team who are often categorised as “soft skills” labour in a broader scope of knowledge work. Venture capitalist insider, Scott Hartley shed light on the “false dichotomy” of hard and soft skills and brought attention to the systemic undervaluation of soft skills in the industry.
Life in a globalised modern market economy driven by an obsession with quantification, optimisation and efficiency has led to the false belief science or business degrees result in better workforce preparedness. Conducting interviews shed light on the versatility of job seekers with humanities degree who excelled our communication assessments — written and verbal — as well as original ideas for conflict resolution in scenario assessments. Today, not everyone clutching a STEM degree is guaranteed a job either.
If we are to accept the vocational model of tertiary education then we ought to not be fooled into believing a management or economics major will graduate and find employment in an equivalent field. Plainly, a management or mathematics degree will not secure middle management or lead data scientist positions upon graduation.
STEM’s prominence both as a framework for skills development and as a signifier for education’s service to economic production, dovetailed with higher education’s transformation into a vocational commodity. The college to career pipeline for the professional class. Market reforms and budget cuts sent tuition costs skyrocketing. A psychic consequence created an expectation of a return of investment on the purchase of a degree. In time, the rise of business schools and economic deregulation placed the Bachelor of Arts on the defensive in a world increasingly fetishising STEM skill sets. STEM’s ascent is auspiciously connected to the prosperity of the tech and finance industries as primary engines of economic growth. Arguably, the only industries providing an illusory promise of career growth.
An interconnected, globalised world collapses business time, ushers new cultural exchanges into everyday business culture and calls upon a wider social/cultural competency that arts majors are demonstratively qualified to handle. Although it is true most jobs in tech and associated industries do not require a degree, company culture or hiring practices often do value them. In reality, the rapid pace and shifting job roles of the industry thrive on the dynamism, creativity and critical-thinking skills nurtured in a Bachelor of Arts. A solid foundation for life-long learning.
Soft and hard skills can be mutually exclusive of the arts and science tertiary education that develop each respective skills. Countless people have studied the arts and acquired technical skills necessary for their tech jobs. The very dichotomy and terminology of “soft” have been critiqued cogently by Seth Godin whose insights signal a wider industry shift in recruitment practice. Interestingly, the boom of Tech globally and particularly in Silicon Valley can be attributed to the harmonisation of hard and soft skills — and more tech CEOs have taken notice.
In 2019, YouTube, Google, Slack and Airbnb had liberal arts majors at the helm of company leadership. Eric Berridge, founder of Bluewolf, an IBM company, brought attention to the importance of employing more humanities graduates. Berridge’s TedTalk in May 2018 was a compelling presentation on the invaluable role “soft skills” and liberal arts training played in the leapfrogging success of his company. In a particular example, Berridge recalled a story of a Philosophy-major-turned-bartender who clinched a deal with an investor in a move that astonished management and propelled a paradigm shift in the Bluewolf’s hiring process. In a poetic connection, IBM in 1998 hired Stanford Anthropologist, Dr Genevieve Bell, who founded one of the first corporate social science research departments of its kind in the world. Her seminal work connected products to people across the globe, and shed humanised the production cycle for IBM’s flagship products.
Inequalities remain
Before the pandemic, mainstream pundits at The Economist boldly celebrated the “great jobs boom” and lauded macroeconomic indicators as a sign of overarching prosperity. In reality, income inequality in developed and developing economies ticked sharply upwards in the 2010s — despite a myriad of tech business established in the same decade! Old habits and thinking dies hard.
Countries from low to high income reported similar trends. Young and other marginalised groups joined the swelling ranks of underemployed workers whilst households across income brackets sank further into debt. Non-engineer tech jobs are seldom compensated as regularly and handsomely as engineers, whilst other companies report no compensation schemes at all. Tragically, South Africa has plenty of skilled people unable to find stable fulfilling employment that matches their abilities. Bad HR practice is one of many obstacles in the way.
Even companies branded as innovative and industry leaders fall short of genuine people-centred systems. American Techno-Libertarian influential icons Peter Thiel and Patty McCord have embraced the precarity facing workers in these times. McCord, unembellished, said “the age of job security is over” at her 2017 London TedTalk. Thiel and McCord represent an ultra-individualist, hyper responsibilisation and highly transactional employee-employer relationship ethos spreading across the global industry (let alone an awareness of tech’s impact on surrounding urban life).
At the risk of presenting as a disgruntled member of Tech’s left-wing, I am confident city council driven partnerships with mutual sustainability goals in mind (which include housing, minimum wage or living standards) is a model that fosters a broader win for companies, workers and others who live in the surrounding urban areas. Sweden pursues an outline of the aforementioned model for entrepreneurship that helped music streaming giant Spotify rise to eminence. The influence of socially-minded workers will not only meet the labour demands of the present but propel the industry to accept higher ethical standards in a world growing increasingly critical of Tech’s role in our lives.
Soft skills in practice
It is undeniable that technical skills for coding are in higher demand comparatively and therefore the scarcity index has driven up labour costs. But this obsession has marginalised other key positions in the frenzied industry-wide pursuit of developers to outpace the real and imagined competition. Embedded the neural fibres of the industry lies an assumption of soft skills as abundant, generalised, easier to source and hire. Scholars have labelled this phenomenon the feminisation of work, where certain positions clustered in the administrative or knowledge division of labour are socially and financially undervalued.
Upholding the value hierarchy in companies is, often ironically, spearheaded by HR, Talent Acquisition specialists and other knowledge soft skill jobs. Workers in Talent Acquisition, HR (or “People” teams, as these are known in Tech) work tirelessly to ensure all aspects of office life remain operationally seamless, organic and expected. Streams of administrative labour pull together lease obligations, equipment, salary payments, compensation reviews and the stacks of infinitely stocked snacks, groceries whilst the beverages reappear as if it were the magical works of dining halls in Hogwarts.
On a structural level, designers, ergonomic experts, industrial psychologists, architects and influencers shape the cultural fabric of the workplace. Environment-making potential can mean anything from chosen furniture fixtures and hardware, guidelines for meetings, seating arrangements, company parties or events, survey data collection and decor attuned for optimal work conditions.
Take Slack, for example, a staple of internal communications in Tech across the world. It’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, holds a degree in Philosophy and History, and has hired untraditional skills, including a theatre-trained artist who was involved in product design. This reflects a broader trend of non-technical folks entering tech companies to fill positions integral to operations. I was routinely surprised and proud to find teachers, lawyers, theologians, historians, writers and artists all under the same roof working in an array of intricate roles not intuitively related to their qualifications. The ratio of engineers and other hard skill-based employees in those companies hovered around the 25% mark — less when the product is not built in-house.
An arts mindset for modern work practices
An arts education hones the creative and managerial dexterity required to adapt to modern jobs defined by expeditious multitasking, critical thinking, data synthesising, and context curated communication skills. Understanding a company as a social entity bubbling in complex energy networks creates more sustainable expectations from labour to compensation.
When I worked for a leading startup which had built South Africa’s first digital tech talent marketplace, I witnessed organisational labour demands create jobs perfectly aligned for creative knowledge workers who have otherwise struggled in a deregulated gig-economy. At the same time, colleagues trained in Organisational/Industrial Psychology initiated a cultural shift from an obsession of in-office culture to remote arrangements.
In the start-up world, there is ample work to be done and once the product team completes the mammoth task of building the product, a gargantuan amount of energy and work is needed to get that product to the customer, requiring positions through operations to research, strategy and sales, litigation, marketing tools, customer support, and user experience.
Tech’s dizzying speeds and cultural preoccupation with engineer-first thinking can be totalising for non-tech positions, even in companies where engineers are outnumbered by their non-technical counterparts. Although a common thread in my jobs concerned technical recruitment in some form, I can assure you that most innovative and profitable companies find themselves in an equally taxing pull to find software engineers and the “soft skills” needed to manage the logistical and customer sides of the business. When I moved into full-time talent acquisition and HR role at a FinTech company, I discovered that finding the right skills, team and company fit is a difficult task across any open role.
In the Talent Team at the recruitment startup, almost all of my colleagues had Masters degrees in various fields of the social sciences and liberal arts that would prove critical, at least in the early stages of the company, in guiding the product. The people-focused job demanded tenacious social cognisance, emotional intelligence and patience in the face of new encounters in a vast marketplace. Difficult conversations became a regular occurrence, and many of the individuals/customers we met, faced turmoil in the form of family pressures, stress, retrenchment anxiety and so forth. Understanding these experiences required locating each story and our business within wider society — itself a collection of socio-historical complexities. South Africa is not and cannot be interpolated through a Silicon Valley mindset.
Filtering this knowledge back into the company drove business development and the internal culture of responsibility at work. Had we listened to the technical rationality of the business-minded folks who avoided tough social conversations then our product would have ultimately suffered. Perhaps it is time to normalise a broadening definition of valued tech work.
STE(A)M over STEM
Naturally, this premise is not to negate or diminish the real impact of the STEM skills shortage in Tech, especially coding skills, in order to steer people away from pursuing these careers. Instead, like numerous industry insiders before me, I advocate an acceptance or inclusion of Arts into a “STEAM” orientated framework.
Outmoded leadership, growth metrics and HR practices lack creative recruitment metrics. If we ignore the Arts in STE(A)M, we do not recognise the jobs that are actually driving an organisation. One part of this is exposing dated notions of labour and anachronistic hierarchies; another is consciousness-raising in the classes or divisions of workers in an expanding influential industry to help reduce inequality and modernise company relations in an era of grave uncertainty paired with cautious optimism.
Engineers typically confuse the perfect storm of these factors and mistakenly associate high labour value with intrinsic value. In fact, sadly, some of the most overpaid and mediocre workers in Tech are the engineers. Utopianists will call for a duality in education; awarding bachelors with a strong portion of liberal arts majors and coding capabilities but this strives to solve one piece of a bigger problem.
Tech’s ethical future is contested. Social consciousness among tech employees pushed boundaries and agitated when their voices were unheard to effect change. For example, at Google, workers supported fired staff members that refused to work on a project with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Facebook is also no stranger to controversy; employees have contested and protested scores of misinformation cases and general ethical breaches in public privacy, data and safety. Pursuing a liberal arts degree is worth the effort because we are already living to witness the best products of innovative companies and pushing for higher industry standards.
I’ve seen numerous colleagues enter the job market expecting to be undervalued. Instead, they ultimately made integral contributions within the workplace. Tech companies constantly give lip service to moving towards a human-centred approach which means the humanities rooted in the liberal arts will continue to make an imperfect but leading role in the industry’s future.
