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If you've got a liberal-arts degree, is there any room for you in the booming tech sector? A few weeks ago, in a Forbes cover story, I argued that the answer is: "Yes!" Now, LinkedIn data scientist Alice Ma has crunched the numbers. In a new blog post, she highlights 12 eye-catching ways that non-technical strivers can be welcomed into the coders' lair.
Mention the name of any fast-growing tech company, particularly glamorous ones like Google and Facebook -- and many people conjure up movie-like scenes of well-paid software engineers creating the future on their laptops. This stereotype leaves hardly any room for non-technical people, except maybe as kitchen help. But that's not the world works, Ma finds.
By combing through LinkedIn member profiles -- and matching up current U.S. jobs with college degrees -- Ma finds a surprising trend from 2010 to 2013. Hiring of liberal-arts majors in tech companies actually grew 10% faster than the rate of job offers to computer-science and engineering majors . Why would tech companies want people who know more about Kierkegaard than compilers? The following table, based on LinkedIn's analysis of tech-company jobs held by liberal-arts majors, provides a clue:
In short, there's lots of non-technical work to be done at tech companies. The list starts with sales jobs, and then progresses through marketing, project management, customer service and a host of other specialties, rounding out a top-10 ranking with human-resources work.
Strikingly, Ma points out, liberal arts majors actually do end up in software engineering every now and then. Their degrees may not proclaim them to be highly technical, but somewhere along the way, 3.5% of the liberal-arts graduates picked up enough coding expertise to be worth hiring for that strength alone.
Is an Ivy League degree necessary? Not really, Ma finds, in what amounts to her 11th insight. She analyzed three pools of liberal-arts graduates: those with degrees from universities and colleges rated in the top 20 by U.S. News & World Report; those who graduated from top-100 schools that weren't in the top 20, and those whose schools didn't make the top 100 lists at all.
Some 9.6% of the elite schools' liberal-arts graduates ended up in tech, compared with 9.3% for the middle band, and 7.6% for the people who attended not-so-famous schools. That's a modest difference, but it's hardly night and day.
Ma's 12th insight: work experience makes a big difference. She found that recent graduates were 3 to 5 percentage points more likely to be hired by a tech company if they had picked up some full-time experience in another, stepping-stone job, compared with their success rate straight out of college. As Ma observes: people today "have more opportunities and resources to get the job they want," but they still need to propel themselves into the right situations.
Ma's study is based on a classical definition of liberal arts, which includes not just the humanities and social sciences, but also the natural sciences, too, as well as theoretical math. Would her findings be all that different if she took a narrower definition of liberal arts, and confined her analysis to people who earned their degrees in humanities and social sciences?
Probably not. In Ma's liberal-arts pool, 84% of the people she followed were humanities and social science majors. Only 16% of them opted for degrees in the natural sciences or math.
