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Deep and Wide: Katharine Brooks on Becoming a T-shaped Professional

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Earlier today I blogged on the need for humanities students to take seriously the need to become more literate in science, technology and mathematics, both in order to pursue the ideal of a well-rounded liberal arts education and very pragmatically in order to prepare themselves for the world of work. Katharine Brooks (UT-Austin), one of the keynoters at the Rethinking Success conference at Wake Forest takes up the same point in a different manner in her reflections on the need for job candidates coming out of college to present themselves as T-shaped individuals, persons with deep knowledge of one or two areas and broad knowledge of several.

According to those in the talent-seeking field, the most sought-after candidates for management, consulting, research, and other leadership positions are T-shaped. The vertical stem of the T is the foundation: an in-depth specialized knowledge in one or two fields. The horizontal crossbar refers to the complementary skills of communication (including negotiation), creativity, the ability to apply knowledge across disciplines, empathy (including the ability to see from other perspectives), and an understanding of fields outside your area of expertise.

Organizations need workers with specialized knowledge who can also think broadly about a variety of areas, and apply their knowledge to new settings. Since T-shaped professionals possess skills and knowledge that are both broad and deep, developing and promoting your T-shaped talent may be the ticket to yourcareer success now and in the future.

The term “T-shaped” isn’t new: it’s been in use since the 1990s but mostly in consulting and technical fields. Several companies, including IDEO andMcKinsey & Company, have used this concept for years because they have always sought multidisciplinary workers who are capable of responding creatively to unexpected situations. Many companies have also developed interdisciplinary T teams to solve problems.

Dr. Phil Gardner at Michigan State University, who researches and writes regularly on recruiting trends, has been researching the concept of the T-shaped professional and the T-shaped manager. At the recent Rethinking Success Conference at Wake Forest University, Dr. Gardner described the ideal job candidate as a “liberal arts student with technical skills” or a “business/engineering student with humanities training”— in other words, a T-shaped candidate. Dr. Gardner is currently developing a guide for college students based on this concept. He notes that “while the engineers are out in front on this concept – every field will require T professional development.”

As my post earlier today suggested, I think this kind of approach to things is absolutely crucial for graduates in humanities programs, and we ought to shape our curricula–both within the majors and in our general education programs– in such a way that we are producing students confident in and able to articulate the ways in which their education and experiences have made them both deep and broad.
If I can take a half step back from those assertions and plunge in another direction, I will only point out that there is a way in which this particular formulation may let my brethren who are in technical fields off the hook a little too easily.  If it is the case that engineers are leaders in this area, I will say that the notion of breadth that is entailed may be a fairly narrow one, limited to the courses that students are able to get in their general education curriculum.
My colleague, Ray Norman, who is the Dean of our School of Science Engineering and Health has talked with me on more than one occasion about how desirable his engineering graduates are because they have had several courses in the humanities.  I am glad for that, but I point out to him that it is absolutely impossible for his engineering graduates to even minor in a field in my area, much less dream of a double major.  About a decade ago when I was chair of the English department, I went to a colleague who has since vacated the chair of the engineering department, asking if we could talk about ways that we could encourage some interchange between our departments, such that I could encourage my majors to take more engineering or other technical courses, and he could encourage his engineers to minor in English.  He was enthusiastic but also regretful.  He’d love to have my English majors in his program, but he couldn’t send his engineers my way;  the size of the engineering curriculum meant it was absolutely impossible for his students to take anything but the required courses in general education.
I don’t hold this against my colleagues; they labor under accreditation standards and national expectations in the discipline.  But I do think it raises again important questions about what an undergraduate education is for, questions explored effectively by Andrew Delbanco’s recent book.  Should undergraduate programs be so large and so professionally oriented that students are unable to take a minor or possibly a double major?  Whistling in to the wind, I say they should not.  Breadth and Depth should not mean the ability to know ONLY one thing really well;  it ought to mean knowing AT LEAST one thing really well, and a couple of other things pretty well, and several other things generally well.
Oddly enough, it is far easier for liberal arts students to achieve this richer kind of breadth and depth, if they only will.  A major in history, a minor in sociology, a second minor in information sciences, a couple of internships working on web-development at a museum, a college with a robust general education program.  There’s a T-shape to consider.
[Side note;  It was Camp Hill Old Home Week at Wake Forest and the Rethinking Success conference last week.  At a dinner for administrators and career officers hosted by Jacquelyn Fetrow, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Jacque and Katherine Brooks discovered they’d both grown up in Camp Hill, and both within a half dozen blocks of where I now live.  Small world, and Camp Hill is leading it :-)]

Do Humanities Programs Encourage the Computational Illiteracy of Their Students?

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I think the knee-jerk and obvious answer to my question is “No.”  I think if humanities profs were confronted with the question of whether their students should develop their abilities in math (or more broadly in math, science and technology), many or most would say Yes.  On the other hand, I read the following post from Robert Talbert at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.  It got me thinking just a bit about how and whether we in the humanities contribute to an anti-math attitude among our own students, if not in the culture as a whole.

I’ve posted here before about mathematics’ cultural problem, but it’s really not enough even to say “it’s the culture”, because kids do not belong to a single monolithic “culture”. They are the product of many different cultures. There’s their family culture, which as Shaughnessy suggests either values math or doesn’t. There’s the popular culture, whose devaluing of education in general and mathematics in particular ought to be apparent to anybody not currently frozen in an iceberg. (The efforts of MIT, DimensionU, and others have a steep uphill battle on their hands.)

And of course there’s the school culture, which itself a product of cultures that are out of kids’ direct control. Sadly, the school culture may be the toughest one to change, despite our efforts at reform. As the article says, when mathematics is reduced to endless drill-and-practice, you can’t expect a wide variety of students — particularly some of the most at-risk learners — to really be engaged with it for long. I think Khan Academy is trying to make drill-and-practice engaging with its backchannel of badges and so forth, but you can only apply so much makeup to an inherently tedious task before learners see through it and ask for something more.

via Can Math Be Made Fun? – Casting Out Nines – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This all rings pretty true to me.  There are similar versions of this in other disciplines.  In English, for instance, students unfortunately can easily learn to hate reading and writing through what they imbibe from popular culture or through what the experience in the school system.  For every hopeless math geek on television, there’s a reading geek to match.  Still and all, I wonder whether we in the humanities combat and intervene in the popular reputation of mathematics and technological expertise, or do we just accept it, and do we in fact reinforce it.

I think, for instance, of the unconscious assumption that there are “math people” and “English people”;  that is, there’s a pretty firmly rooted notion that people are born with certain proclivities and abilities and there is no point in addressing deficiencies in your literacy in other areas.  More broadly, I think we apply this to students, laughing in knowing agreement when they talk about coming to our humanities disciplines because they just weren’t math persons or a science persons, or groaning together in the faculty lounge about how difficult it is to teach our general education courses to nursing students or to math students.  As if our own abilities were genetic.

In high school I was highly competent in both math and English, and this tendency wasn’t all that unusual for students in the honors programs.  On the other hand, I tested out of math and never took another course in college, and none of my good humanistic teachers in college ever challenged and asked me to question that decision.  I was encouraged to take more and different humanities courses (though, to be frank, my English teachers were suspicious of my interest in philosophy), but being “well-rounded’ and “liberally educated”  seems in retrospect to have been largely a matter of being well-rounded in only half of the liberal arts curriculum.  Science and math people were well-rounded in a different way, if they were well-rounded at all.

There’s a lot of reason to question this.  Not least of which being that if our interests and abilities are genetic we have seen a massive surge of the gene pool toward the STEM side of the equation if enrollments in humanities majors is to serve as any judge.  I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who recently pointed out that genius has a lot less to do with giftedness than it does with practice and motivation.  Put 10000 hours in to almost anything and you will become a genius at it (not entirely true, but the general principle applies).  Extrapolating, we might say that even if students aren’t going to be geniuses in math and technology, they could actually get a lot better at it if they’d only try.

And there’s a lot of reason to ask them to try.  At the recent Rethinking Success conference at Wake Forest, one of the speakers who did research into the transition of college students in to the workplace pounded the table and declared, “In this job market you must either be a technical student with a liberal arts education or a liberal arts major with technical savvy.  There is no middle ground.”  There is no middle ground.  What became quite clear to me at this conference is that companies mean it that they want students with a liberal arts background.  However, it was also very clear to me that they expect them to have technical expertise that can be applied immediately to job performance. Speaker after speaker affirmed the value of the liberal arts.  They also emphasized the absolute and crying need for computational, mathematical, and scientific literacy.

In other words, we in the Humanities will serve our students extremely poorly if we accept their naive statements about their own genetic makeup, allowing them to proceed with a mathematical or scientific illiteracy that we would cry out against if the same levels of illiteracy were evident in others with respect to our own disciplines.

I’ve found, incidentally, that in my conversations with my colleagues in information sciences or math or sciences, that many of them are much more conversant in the arts and humanities than I or my colleagues are in even the generalities of science, mathematics, or technology.  This ought not to be the case, and in view of that i and a few of my colleagues are considering taking some workshops in computer coding with our information sciences faculty.  We ought to work toward creating a generation of humanists that does not perpetuate our own levels of illiteracy, for their own sake and for the health of our disciplines in the future.

Preliminary Takeaways from Rethinking Success

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My colleague, John Fea, has already wrapped up his experience at Rethinking Success and is off to talk about his book at Notre Dame.  He’s hoping to avoid the slings and arrows tossed his way by the likes of Mark Noll.  The third day is just beginning, so I’m not quite ready to wrap up myself, but a few anticipatory thoughts and considerations.

First, it has been good for me to see that the School of the Humanities at Messiah College has been taking a number of good steps already, confirming my sense begun about 2 and a half years ago (and even earlier as a chair) that we in the Humanities had to do a much better job of addressing the question of jobs and careers.  It seems to me, frankly, that a number of elite national liberal arts institutions are only at the stage we were in the School of the Humanities two and a half years ago in grappling with how to address the situation of careers and the humanities.  At Messiah our steps have been few, but they have been serious and we seem to have done intuitively what some of the other liberal arts programs are beginning.  We have taken small but significant steps to integrate career considerations in to the curriculum, and to do that from the beginning of their time in a major, and we’ve had multiple faculty conversations and professional development opportunities to improve faculty advising for careers.  The results have been solid so far.  Student satisfaction in the area of career advising and preparation is up, though I admit we don’t have solid data on how effectively our students have transitioned in to the workplace.

Second,  it’s obvious that resourcing is key.  It’s just really staggering what Wake Forest has decided to do in promoting career development, putting it front and center on their agenda in liberal arts education, and not just doing that with rhetoric but with institutional structure and with dollars.  Moreover, it is clear that it is a presidential initiative that everyone has to take seriously.  Given the much higher levels of resource that most of the elite liberal arts institutions have, and some of the plans they’ve started espousing, I have no doubt they will be leap-frogging past our efforts in short order.  On the other hand, I think this will be a good thing on the whole for the discourse surrounding the liberal arts.  The conversation about what the liberal arts are and how they ought to connect to careers will only change fundamentally if places like Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Wake Forest, and Harvard and Yale and others take up the cudgel and change.  So I was extremely glad to see the national liberal arts colleges seeing this as a priority for liberal arts generally.

Third, it’s obvious that faculty is a key.  Here again, I think we at Messiah are modestly ahead of the game.  We were one of a very few schools that even brought a faculty member, and we brought three.  This signifies, I think, the seriousness with which the faculty has begun taking this issue at Messiah College, though, of course, I can always wish it was more widespread and more deeply felt.  Universally speakers pointed to the fact that faculty don’t think career development is their responsibility, but if students are going to make the transition in to the workplace from a liberal arts major they have to be able to speak clearly about the way their whole college experience, including their academic experience, has prepared them for the jobs ahead of them.  That can’t be done without effective faculty participation and buy in.  Secondarily, it was clear issues of curriculum have to be addressed–either in general education or in the majors or both–to assure that students actually have the skills they need for success.  That, again, can’t happen without serious faculty engagement with the question of what the curriculum should look like and how it might connect to career preparation.

The final note is that clearly we’ve only just begun.  It was evident to me that we’ve only taken first steps and that our continued work in this area is probably another two or three year process to really establish the cultural change we need to establish.  I think the biggest areas for us to consider have to do with the curriculum. One speaker made it abundantly clear that fundamental skills were essential.  As he put it “You must either be a science tech graduate who is liberally educated, or your must be a liberal are graduate who is science and technically savvy.  There is no middle ground.”  Other conversations and talks such as that from Hampden Sydney President, made it clear that while companies do talk about the need for communication skills etcetera, the type of things we find in the humanities, it is more or less the case that they are assuming the technical skills.  That is, it is fundamentally important that students have the kinds of technical skills necessary to do the jobs for which they are applying.  In flush times companies were willing to hire the smartest kids and train them in the specifics.  In lean times they want the students to have the skills to do the job, and they want those students to have the skills associated with a liberal arts education as well.  We need to keep talking about transferable skills at Messiah College, but we’ve got to talk about what skills students need that we currently aren’t giving them effectively.

In the humanities I think this might mean two or three things for us:  First is I think we need to require internships.  It was a universal refrain that the kinds of experiences students get in internships are the single most important factor in hiring decisions for companies.  If we can develop internships containing reflective components focused on the discipline, we could do a better job of not only making sure students have those experiences but that they are able to connect their disciplinary education to the world of work.  Second, I think this means a harder and more urgent look at technology and the humanities.  As some folks know who follow this blog, I am an advocate for the digital humanities and am trying to get a few things off the ground here at Messiah.  So far I’ve talked about that in terms associated with the future of the humanities.  I’ve become convinced this weekend that we need to broaden that conversation to talk about the future of our students.  The skills associated  with digital humanities are the kinds of skills that will make our students more effective competitors in the marketplace and enable them to infuse the values and interests of humanistic learning in to the world of work.  Finally, I think we need to pursue the idea of a Business Bootcamp at Messiah College, a course or intensive summer program specifically focused on liberal arts students needing to make the transition in to the business world so that they can more effectively become familiar with basic skills they will need, and think more effectively about how their disciplinary skills are useful in the business world.

Enough for now, the bus ride is over.

Accessing the Rethinking Success Conference

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Wake Forest has done an exceptional job, I think, of creating this conference as a resource for the academic community at large. The goings-on of the conference can be accessed in realtime through Twitter at #rethinkingsuccess, which they are using as a Storify version of the conference.  (John Fea and I are cited several times, so happy to contribute to the view of what going on).  But they are also doing a good job of getting the word out in other ways.

Andy Chan from Wake Forest is compiling a record of the conference at his blog, and there you can access video interviews with the main speakers as well as summaries of the sessions.

There’s also been some good press, with an Inside Higher Ed report this morning.

Finally, Wake has provided a great resource page that examines these issues through linked articles and essays–a bibliography of the main issues according to the topic.

Kudos to Wake for providing a great service to the academic community.

Rethinking Success: Liberal Arts and Careers for the 21st century

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I’ve just arrived in Wake Forest NC for the Rethinking Success Conference where we’re planning on thinking about liberal arts and careers.  This has been a particular area that I’ve put some emphasis on in the past couple of years since becoming dean, believing we need to do a much better job of articulating the connections, but also forging connections, not just articulating.  In our areas in the humanities at Messiah College,  I’ve asked faculty and departments to craft more comprehensive career development plans connected to the curriculum, to focus on advising for life after college, to connect more intentionally with our Career Center, and to do a better job of highlighting the variety of successes that our humanities majors have had in the world of work and other areas of endeavor in their lives after college.  I’m looking forward to this conference to see what we’ve done well and what we could do better.  Attendees are from a wide variety of institutions–though a particularly heavy dose of national liberal arts colleges and Ivies–and Messiah is one of two institutions I saw associated with the CCCU, so maybe our particular orientation as a faith-based institution can bring something useful to the conversation.

I admit there’s a part of me that can be a little leery about these kinds of conversations.  On the one hand, I think a lot of time humanities scholars and administrators  get together and cheerlead, preaching to the choir about how badly our disciplines are needed, without really thinking through material and discursive needs of our various audiences.  This conference doesn’t look like it will do that, but it does strike me that “Rethinking Success” could mean many different things.

On the one hand, “Rethinking Success” could be a wagging finger in the face of the body politic, or, since I’m not so certain that we have a body politic in this country anymore, maybe we should call it the body economicus.  That is, talking about Rethinking Success in humanistic circles often devolves in to discussion about how the culture at large needs to rethink success, and we in the humanities are just the people who are there to help them do it.  Give up your pecuniary interests, we say, and learn how to be civic minded by majoring in the liberal arts. So we take it as our job to shame the commercialization of the culture at large in the hopes that it will have a heartfelt conversion and find their way back to philosophy, theology, history, and literature–in other words, the way to rethink success is to encourage everyone else to change their habits so that we can do what we’ve always done and be …..more successful at it.

I actually don’t completely disagree with that notion.  As I’ve noted in my sometimes mixed reviews of Andrew Delbanco’s recent book,  I really do think there is a lot to be said for recapturing a better notion of the civic orientation and the transformative character of learning that has typically characterized learning in liberal arts colleges.  In other words, understanding that life and learning is more than instrumental is the bailiwick of the liberal arts, and that involves people rethinking what success means in life.

I remember an undergraduate class I had as a freshman wherein I was asked to list my life goals.  I indicated I wanted to own a house on a lake and a boat.  My professor rather drily noted in the margins, “You may want to rethink this.”  Indeed, and my liberal arts education did in fact work the kind of transforming power that Delbanco talks about by reorienting my thinking about what was really important in life.  (On the other hand, I still wouldn’t mind owning a house on a lake and a boat, I just don’t’ define that as a life’s goal and purpose).

Nevertheless, I think that “Rethinking Success” can’t be focused outwardly alone for those of us who are in the liberal art and in the humanities especially.  We need to do some self-examination for how and why the humanities may need to change what it is doing in the world today, rather than taking on the role of the embattled chosen remnant of some lost educational utopia.  Especially, I think that we need to think carefully about how much our undergraduate education is focused on reproducing people just like us.  That is, we imagine success in our areas as producing future holders of doctorates and professors in colleges and universities across the country.  The sign of a “successful” program is the production of such future professors.  Bunk.  We need to recognize that success in our areas has to mean the production of thoughtful and informed persons who go on to become bankers;  we need to value students and programs that prepare secondary teachers as much or more than we value programs that produce PhD candidates;  we need to prepare and applaud students who make their way into the many different horizons of the world, not simply those who make their way in to our world as future professors, a form of narcissistic projection if there ever was one.  And we need to think about how our curricula prepare students for these horizons.  I’ve suggested to others many times in the past that in the humanities we tend to do a great job of broadening students horizons, but we need to do a much better job of showing them how to forge pathways in to those horizons.  Facilitating students pathway in to a vocation or a career is not something extraneous to our educational purpose.  In most ways it is central to our purpose and we have forgotten or ignored that.

I’m hoping this conference will help me and my colleagues here how to think through that issue.

If you’re interested in following along with the conference, I know there’s a twitter hashtag #rethinkingsuccess.  I’ll be blogging about the conference sporadically at this site, and I know my colleague John Fea intends to do so as well.  Your thoughts and comments are appreciated.