Business Sector Eagerly Seeking Out Liberal Arts Graduates

In the competitive world of business, college graduates need more help than ever before. While there are hundreds of thousands of job postings in the business sector every year, managers and owners are finding it harder to fill these positions, due to the shortage of graduates with the soft skills needed to truly succeed. For this reason, the world’s top businessmen are pushing for more and more schools to offer liberal arts educations — the very same liberal arts education that has pushed Christendom to the front of the pack for nearly forty years.

According to Study International, the conventional route of graduating with a specialized education is proving to not be enough in today’s job market, as more and more graduates enter the post-graduate world with strait-laced skills, such as number-crunching and date analysis, but nothing truly groundbreaking to offer a company.

For this reason, more and more business schools are insisting on reincorporating the liberal arts into graduate school curricula — a movement that businessmen, such as American Express CEO Kenneth Chanault, have been pushing for for the past decade.

“I am a strong believer in liberal arts education. What we really need today are people who have broad perspectives, people who are willing to take some chances intellectually and learn about the subjects that they may not be best in the world at. We need people who are going to be intellectually curious,” said Chanault.

Study International backs this statement up, further emphasizing the value of subjects that many pundits downplay in the modern age, such as philosophy.

“What makes liberal arts majors so predisposed to success? Part of the reason is due to the promotion of soft skills and flexible qualities within liberal arts degrees, and degrees that draw heavily from a liberal arts framework – these include critical thinking, empathy, and communication. Philosophy encourages students to consider both sides of an argument or proposal – tremendously useful in decision-making. Political science teaches students to analyze an issue or problem taking into account organizational structure and competing interests,” says Study International.

“All these attributes are monumentally important to employers and organizations that have to contend with the rapidly globalized world that grows more complex by the day. Indeed, perhaps the main reason why graduates in these fields end up in leadership and managerial roles is their ability to see the bigger picture. Because all liberal arts disciplines – from history to psychology – are deeply linked to one another, studying one means studying a bit of the rest,” says Study International.

In today’s job market, graduates with a liberal arts background have an edge — soft skills — that specialized graduates are now lacking, making them that much more appealing to today’s employers.

The liberal arts curriculum at Christendom College is designed to maximize the potential of every student, giving them this edge that employers are now looking for. In the classroom, they study the greatest works of Western Civilization and see how different subjects, such as history and philosophy, connect to one another, giving them the ability to see the bigger picture. When they are not talking about these subjects in class or outside of it, they can be found writing about them, developing their critical thinking and written communication skills in a manner that is lacking in many of today’s graduates.

With this desired skillset in place, Christendom graduates have the ability to jump into the business world and find success, with graduates currently working as CEOs, managers, and founding their own companies.

To find out more about the success of Christendom alumni, please visit here.