Branding Essentials for the English Major: 4 Examples of How to Re-package Your Skills for Employers

It seems every week some “expert” publishes an article lamenting on the fact that if college students want to ensure they can get a good job after graduation, they should steer clear of “worthless” majors. Go into business or technology, say the authors. Stay away from things like English literature or creative writing.

This argument comes from the erroneous assumption that a college education is best spent developing a repertoire of “hard skills” for immediate transferability to your first employer. What this argument misses is two crucial things: one, hard skills are easy to teach a new hire; and two, earning a degree in the liberal arts is about investing time into learning skills that set you up for winning the marathon, not the sprint.

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As English majors, we are quite good at articulating abstract ideas and that’s what this article is all about: how to brand your in-demand skill set into something tangible that employers (in any industry) will realize they desperately want and need. —Brooke Kile, Dear English Major