Sell Yourself! Liberal Arts Skills Employers Want

By Susan de la Vergne

Sell Yourself! is a step-by-step guide explaining how you can translate liberal arts skills and abilities into business language and how you can prepare a résumé that sells prospective managers on your liberal arts job-ready skills!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan de la Vergne
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310552274

Susan de la Vergne

I wrote my first short story when I was eight, a tale of cowboys and rustlers in the old west, of horse stealing and shoot-outs by the corral. I made copies and gave them to our neighbors who (very kindly) read it. My career as a self-publishing writer had begun. Then I went on to do what writers do--read, write, and major in English in college, which led me to a long career in... information technology. But that's another story. Today, I'm a writer and an editor. I especially like to write about the workplace because there's so little fiction about work, and yet so much happens at work besides work! Although I hover over a keyboard a lot, I also teach ESL, meditation, and modern Buddhism. I live in Los Angeles, which is my home town. I've always been grateful to this city because it's a place where people dream big, and when you're surrounded by dreams, you're more likely to have some of your own.

Book preview

Sell Yourself!

Liberal Arts Skills Employers Want

By Susan de la Vergne

*****

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Susan de la Vergne 2014

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The Market, the Need, the Value

Chapter 2 – The Liberal Arts Skills

Chapter 3 – Analytical Skills

Chapter 4 – Communication Skills

Chapter 5 – Cross-Cultural Skills and Foreign Language Proficiency

Chapter 6 – Emotional Intelligence

Chapter 7 – Leadership

Chapter 8 – Research Skills

Chapter 9 – Systemic Thinking

Chapter 10 – Building Your Résumé

Chapter 11 – General Résumé and Cover Letter Advice

Chapter 12 – Your Pitch

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Sell Yourself! Liberal Arts Skills Employers Want

Introduction

I’ve spent years on the hiring side of the interview desk, and I know firsthand that liberal arts students bring skills and abilities to the job that are immediately useful. They can write. They can think things through. They are never squeamish in the face of ambiguity. They’re able to engage in healthy debate.

This is a book for you, liberal arts majors, if you’re looking to get the attention of hiring managers.

As you start out, one thing that’s important to know is the difference between recruiters and hiring managers. As a job-seeker, you hear a lot more about recruiters than actual managers. Recruiters front-end the hiring process. They don’t ultimately own the hiring decision. Operational managers—the people you work for once you’re hired—own it. Whether or not it’s the right hiring decision is, finally, on the head of the operational manager, not HR recruiters.

My experience is exclusively as an operational manager (sometimes you’ll hear them called functional managers), never in HR. I worked primarily in Information Technology departments in large companies. So what I’m sharing with you here comes from the perspective of an operational manager. And I bring to this discussion the unshakable opinion that liberal arts students (and by that I’m referring to humanities and social sciences grads) are exceptionally well prepared for a variety of careers in business. I know this because I’ve hired them and because I was one—a humanities major. Thanks to my humanities background, I went on to a long career in corporate management. My education prepared me for that.

Not that anyone ever told me that, of course. When I was in college, people asked me what grade I wanted to teach or what other sort of lifetime of noble poverty I was heading towards. I bet many of you are hearing the same thing. After you read this book, you’ll know how to answer that question if you have other plans, especially if you’re considering a future in the for-profit sector.

Here’s what we’ll do to prepare you to answer that question and tackle the job market:

1. We’ll talk about the job market.

2. We’ll take a close look at why business needs the liberal arts.

3. We’ll take a quick look at the liberal arts skills. Yes, you have some.

4. We’ll look at business priorities—i.e., how business evaluates everything—and then how liberal arts abilities fit into their simple evaluation scheme.

5. Then we’ll take a deep dive into these liberal arts skills—what they are, how you can examine yourself to see if you have them. We’ll also look at what you would do with the skills you have in the real world, and how