There are many liberal arts students applying to study in the U.S., and many of them will aspire to work in Silicon Valley. And take a look at it! The following is my compilation of liberal arts students in the United States Silicon Valley can find a job, welcome to read.
Can liberal arts students find jobs in Silicon Valley in the United States
In everyone's impression, Silicon Valley is a paradise for science students, especially computer science students. The programmers are highly paid, the T-shirts and cowboys are equipped for work, the company provides three meals a day, and the programmers write code and program life every day.
In fact, Forbes has reported that more and more liberal arts graduates are choosing to go into tech companies. While it's been said that science builds atomic bombs, liberal arts says don't drop them. How do these two types of people **** survive in tech companies? In other words again, how does a liberal arts student get a job in Silicon Valley?
Where do liberal arts students fit in at tech companies?
According to George Anders at Forbes, "When the tech geniuses started the war to change the world, they realized they needed to connect their companies more closely to the public and to the humanities," as reported by Transcend. They realized that they needed to bring their companies closer to the public and to the human community. Because only by pulling in enough warring factions could they reach their goal of reform and could make the process of changing the world, a more enjoyable thing."
Researchers in the humanities, long known as the "alchemists of social representations," naturally serve as a bridge between technology companies and the public. We can look to LinkedIn data for evidence of this, and see what's really happening with college graduates with liberal arts degrees joining tech companies.
Before we do that, let's define what we mean by liberal arts: philosophy, natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences broadly.
Liberal arts graduates typically ease into the tech company environment faster than science graduates, according to Collingwood data. And the 10 percent growth rate of liberal arts graduates joining the tech industry from 2010 to 2013 has outpaced computer technology and engineering science. 38% of liberal arts graduates are interested in joining an Internet or software company after graduation, and that's a higher percentage of job seekers than even computer science graduates.
As a whole, liberal arts graduates actually have a wider range of careers than science students. But how do liberal arts graduates survive in a high-tech industry dominated by technical talent and find their own value?
Job Hunting for Liberal Arts Graduates
According to the data, liberal arts graduates who enter the high-tech field are most often employed in sales, market research, and software development.
High-tech fields and companies want to diversify their workforce and are eager to hire liberal arts students who have the social flexibility and critical thinking to add diversity to their teams.
According to the chart, the top 10 positions held by liberal arts students in high-tech companies are: sales, marketing, software development, project manager, customer service, corporate communications, IT support, consulting, business planner, and human resources.
Among them, sales, marketing, and consulting can be achieved in related positions of high-tech income, and have every opportunity to enter the middle and upper management.
Although it is said that liberal arts students' major courses in the university are already fixed, but it does not mean that liberal arts students can not learn later on the job afterward, and cross-career development. In fact, many people are currently engaged in careers that can be very different from their college majors. This is not uncommon in today's business world.
The Gold of a Liberal Arts College Degree
So, do high-tech companies pay attention to the undergraduate rankings of liberal arts students?
According to Creative Insights, 10% of liberal arts students in the US go straight into high-tech companies after undergrad, according to statistics from Collins. In the top 20 percent of schools, that rate is 14 percent.
But that's not to say that tech companies extraordinarily favor liberal arts students at Ivy League schools.
According to Collage's data above, the difference between the percentage of liberal arts students at the top 20 schools, the top 100 schools, and the schools after the top 100 who go into tech is less than a slim 2 percent.
Percentage of liberal arts students in tech at top 20 schools: 9.9 percent
Percentage of liberal arts students in tech at top 100 schools: 9.6 percent
Percentage of liberal arts students in tech at schools ranked after the 100th percentile: 7.5 percent
Experience is critical for liberal arts students
Since tech companies don't have the same level of experience as tech companies, it's important for them to know what they're getting into. >
Since tech companies don't favor the academic credentials of liberal arts students, what's most important? Experience and soft skills, naturally.
Broadly speaking, liberal arts students with relevant work experience are favored by tech companies. In particular, a liberal arts student with full-time relevant experience will find a job within a high-tech company almost as easily.
And according to an earlier analysis of economic charts, in the first half of 2015, the top 10 companies in the industry hired liberal arts employees who almost uniformly had relevant experience in the tech field.
Tech companies also favor liberal arts students with experience in other industries over recent liberal arts students. Even without tech experience, liberal arts students with unrelated industry experience are still better at finding tech jobs than recent undergrads (4% higher hiring rate).
As you can see from the data above, tech companies are more forgiving of the hardware requirements for hiring liberal arts students. Instead, they require soft skills, such as patience, the ability to communicate with others, and teamwork.
Recruitment is also a two-way street, so if you're interested in tech, you need to remember that tech companies aren't just about the people who work in them. You also need to remember that high-tech companies include not only the traditional Internet, but also computer software, computer hardware, biotechnology, online media, e-learning, e-games, consumer electronics, computer and network security, information technology and services, nanotechnology, wireless and medical devices, and even many services that rely on e-commerce.
In the modern world, work has become an economy. People have more opportunities and resources to get the jobs they want. The most important thing that never changes then is what people are able to go for these positions and get the work done properly.
And with such a vast field of new and emerging tech, liberal arts students can make a big difference in it, too, depending on their preferences.
A Silicon Valley bigwig with a liberal arts background
According to the Chongqing Morning Post, investor Peter Thiel, who has been working on the company's first venture capital project in China for over a decade, is a big fan of the company. Peter Thiel, who is now worth more than $100 million, studied philosophy in law school. His main achievement is that he co-founded PayPal and Palantir with his partners, and he is also a successful investor in companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yammer.
Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, also majored in philosophy, and believes that philosophical literacy helps him write and debate better, and Slack is now one of the world's most popular enterprise apps, valued at $2.8 billion.
Parker Harris is a co-founder of Salesforce, where he is responsible for the technical aspects of the company's products and processes. But he never received any specialized education in technology, instead graduating from Minute Maid College with a degree in English literature. Minute Maid College is a smaller liberal arts college in Vermont.
Susan Wojcicki, an early Google employee who became CEO of YouTube in 2014, studied history and literature at Harvard and planned to earn a doctorate in philosophy. A chance encounter with CS50, Harvard's popular computer science program, led her to change her plans. She went on to earn a degree in economics and a master's degree in business administration.
Apple's Steve Jobs attended Reed College, a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Jobs dropped out after one semester. His major is unknown, but the Reed College website reveals that Jobs took classes in many different categories, including philosophy, psychology, and calligraphy. Jobs also often talked about how many of the designs in Apple were inspired by the calligraphy classes he had taken.
Carly Fiorina was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but she majored in history in college. After graduation, she worked as a receptionist and an English teacher until the age of 25, when she switched careers to become a saleswoman for AT&T before moving into the tech sector.
Alibaba, one of the world's largest e-commerce companies, was founded by Jack Ma, who majored in English at Hangzhou Normal College. After graduating from college, he was rejected 30 times before he finally found a job as an English teacher. With his English skills, he read early information and reports about the Internet, and then he decided to start his own online trading.
Ben Silbermann, the co-founder of Pinterest, the popular photo-sharing community valued at $11 billion, studied political science at Yale and worked in online advertising before founding Pinterest.
The CEO of online lender Lending Club, now one of the world's largest online lending platforms, Renaud Laplanche, started out as a corporate mergers and acquisitions lawyer and studied law in France. Before that, he was also a professional sailor and won several national competitions.