Humanities graduates:
The world needs you!
Shose Kessi Associate Professor, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town.
In a seminal column in the Washington Post in 2017, Valerie Strauss published remarkable findings from a study undertaken by tech giant Google. The Silicon Valley behemoth had asked itself: what kind of skills should they look for in new recruits? The answer, catching even Google itself off guard, was not to be found in the STEM fields. They needed humanities graduates. This went against the company’s founding principles. The original hiring algorithms had filtered through top computer science graduates from elite science universities. And while these graduates served the company so well that its name became a verb, they had hit a wall.
The seven top characteristics of success at Google turned out to be soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view) having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver being able to make connections across complex ideas. Sound familiar?
The Silicon Valley behemoth had asked itself: what kind of skills should they look for in new recruits? The answer, catching even Google itself off guard, was not to be found in the STEM fields. They needed humanities graduates.
