Being a Well Rounded Professional

As many of you know, I have a non-traditional background for someone engaged in senior management in business. When people find out that I have a PhD in history, they respond with either (or both) of the following reactions:

• ‘That is so cool!’
• ‘How did you get into this work?’

Several years ago, I got tired of answering the second question so often. So I wrote an article for the regional chapter of the Association of Proposal Management Professionals, the professional organization for my career. Entitled ‘From Historian to Proposal Professional,’ it detailed how I applied what I learned in academia to being successful in my job.

After the article was published, other proposal professionals approached me at industry events and conferences to share their own experiences of applying their arts and humanities education to proposal development. This intrigued me, as the public discourse at the time was full of politicians and famous people attacking the humanities as being useless.

In an attempt to reconcile my anecdotal evidence with this public perception, I did what any historian would do – I began to research. I found the politicians were wrong.  Not only can humanities students work at Starbucks, they had the tools to RUN Starbucks! (The recently retired CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, has a degree in communications).

I looked to see if others had previously discussed the topic. While there are some books available about why an arts/humanities education is beneficial to society, there was no work that defined the skills gained during this education and how they applied to developing a career outside of teaching or academia.

With this knowledge in hand I began to address this shortcoming in the marketplace. I spent mornings before work (and before my kids were awake), lunch breaks, evenings after bedtime, and weekends researching and writing. The result is The Well-Rounded Professional: Translating Humanities Skills into Career Success, my first full-length book and something I am extremely proud of. It is aimed at humanities students (both undergraduate and postgraduate) and graduates looking for ways to enter the traditional job market by detailing what skills they bring to the table, how to highlight those skills to gain employment, how to supplement those skills to continue to grow and advance professionally, and how academia can better serve the humanities student.