Story by: Nikki Wiart
November 2, 2016
Check out this very interesting article by Maclean’s. This article tells the story of how students now are being encouraged to have diverse skills sets, balancing the technical and the liberal arts type classes, to help prepare them for employment opportunities and the employment challenges facing today’s job market. In some college campuses today, programs exist to respond to the call for a diversified skill set in both tech and arts by combining disciplines within degrees, catering to student interests and the future of work by diverging from the traditional university experience. No longer the days of declaring a major and being restricted in course selection by those guidelines, but now allowed the freedom and flexibility to study and develop skills in subjects that interest students and also make them marketable and fit for diversified job requirements. Not only is this being encouraged by education institutions, but the job mark has called for it!
Analytics firm Burning Glass Technologies filtered through 3.8 million entry-level job postings across the United States and found that when a liberal arts grad paired a technical skill- marketing, sales, social media, graphic design, computer programming- with their education, the number of jobs available to them doubled: from 955,000 to 1.8 million! Salaries increased as well. Computer programming and data analytics skills increased salaries the most, but additional skills like social media was a highly sought after skill allowing for 40% more job opportunities.
This also means that companies are now looking at their job requirements with new lenses. The single biggest skill employers looked for software development jobs was writing.
See the full story…
