Why Frontier does not require “Economics Degrees” to do “Economics”
So, I have a confession to make.
We don’t look for Economics degrees to be “Economists” and some of those who present “Economics” to clients at Frontier are not really formally qualified at it.
What we look for when we recruit Economists to Frontier is just a real-world interest in it.
What I have realized is that to do Economics (in the real world for business), you don’t need to have learnt Economics. In fact, it can often hurt, as what’s taught as a subject is far too narrow and linear.
I am being very “open” about it now, as one of the worries that you may have is how someone will view Frontier as an “Economics” firm, having “unqualified” people doing “Economics”.
But it’s a lot easier to explain now.
The last three years can give a good way to explain how everything is interconnected. For quite a while, understanding politics has clearly been as important or more important than normal econ stuff (Brexit, Trump, the twists and turns of Sri Lankan politics all show this). This year, in the biggest of all shocks in recent times, understanding medicine and epidemics became what was really important.
And one of our key team members, started off his education as a Medical student in China (which of course is the most interesting experience you want to have in the recent reality!!) for about a year, before realizing it was not his thing, and came back to Sri Lanka and got a degree in international relations.
Another has an MSc in Psychology after doing an MSc in Software Engineering.
Because of their passion for Economics, plus being really good at our “Real world” economics test for recruits, we hired them to our Economics team, despite not having formal Econ degrees.
It’s only after joining Frontier, and after “doing economics” that they have been acquiring economics qualifications.
For me, it helps that I was very much in the bottom half of my batch in my Econ degree and ended any hopes of getting into a good graduate school for studying beyond my degree.
While I love “Econ in the real world”, the Econ courses I did in my degree were very theoretical, and particularly hard and difficult. (My full story of failure can be found here).
And here I am running a firm best known for its Economics products with a huge passion for what I call “real world econ and markets”.
If you’ve got a passion for Econ, with no formal education in it, feel free to send us your CV here and you might just be presenting econ to our clients one day
