Young people are getting advice from all sides, being told to brush up on their AI skills to be remotely employable, or to just forgo traditional schooling and get into the well-paying trades instead.
But for those who have pursued or plan to pursue programs in the liberal arts or humanities, there’s still a glimmer of hope from leaders who insist that “innately human” skills like communication, courage, curiosity, story-telling and relationship-building will remain valuable and irreplicable by artificial intelligence, no matter how far the technology advances.
This guidance has come not just from academics and employment experts, but also from executives at highly successful firms, including McKinsey & Company.
Majored in history, or were active in sports and clubs? These may be standout attributes
In a new interview with the New York Times, the head of McKinsey & Company, an international management consulting powerhouse, outlined how his hiring teams are seeing value in degrees in humanistic disciplines, which the current discourse around schooling may have you believe are increasingly useless.
“We’ve started to widen the degree profiles we’re looking at in art, music, history. We have a novel problem-solving test, and some of those degrees do better,” McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels told the outlet.
“We want folks who are better at novel creativity.”
Also proving exceptionally advantageous in the professional realm these days is the proven ability to learn new things in unfamiliar areas, the propensity to have an open mind, and the gift of working well with others and simply knowing how to “deal with people,” Sternfels said.
Candidate evaluations test areas you may not expect or realize you excel at
Along with the aforementioned problem-solving assessment to measure critical thinking capacity, McKinsey presents candidates with simulations to demonstrate how well they can pick up and use new information without relying on existing knowledge or recognizing patterns. And what the firm has discovered is that “there’s no correlation to degree type” among those who perform best in these types of crucial aptitude tests.
