What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?
We recently had a company meeting and someone make a joke about if you can’t find a job teaching English, you’d be here at Allen creating e-learning. Well, what made it funny was how true that statement rang. I started counting the amount of people here, including myself, that have an English degree.
It’s pretty staggering.
So while this could be about how our courses are sound grammatically or storyboarded creatively because we are just a bunch of wanna be writing geeks, it isn’t. It made me realize that we have all adapted the best of our skills and applied them in a new way.
In fact, while we may enjoy scripting because we are closet authors, many companies retrain employees to do either more than what they were originally hired to do, or to pick up the slack due to recent lay-offs. And because of this, employees are doing jobs they aren’t trained in. Some employees will feel challenged and inspired to push themselves, while others might want to throw in the towel.
Before you feel overwhelmed and wonder WHY you were given this job to do, take a look at HOW you might be able to get it done.
Here are some helpful links:
Articles on transferring job skills:
Job Journal
Technology Transfer
And here’s an article from 1992 that I think is still relevant today:
New York Times
In a sense, we have come back to realizing the skills we’ve acquired are often more important than the titles we’ve received.
If you aren’t sure what skills you have—or what to call them, go here:
Know Your Skills
Or, if you want junk mail for the rest of your life, try here:
Job Skill Test
What about you? I'd love to hear what skills you've transfered or other sites you know of to test those skills.
It’s pretty staggering.
So while this could be about how our courses are sound grammatically or storyboarded creatively because we are just a bunch of wanna be writing geeks, it isn’t. It made me realize that we have all adapted the best of our skills and applied them in a new way.
In fact, while we may enjoy scripting because we are closet authors, many companies retrain employees to do either more than what they were originally hired to do, or to pick up the slack due to recent lay-offs. And because of this, employees are doing jobs they aren’t trained in. Some employees will feel challenged and inspired to push themselves, while others might want to throw in the towel.
Before you feel overwhelmed and wonder WHY you were given this job to do, take a look at HOW you might be able to get it done.
Here are some helpful links:
Articles on transferring job skills:
Job Journal
Technology Transfer
And here’s an article from 1992 that I think is still relevant today:
New York Times
In a sense, we have come back to realizing the skills we’ve acquired are often more important than the titles we’ve received.
If you aren’t sure what skills you have—or what to call them, go here:
Know Your Skills
Or, if you want junk mail for the rest of your life, try here:
Job Skill Test
What about you? I'd love to hear what skills you've transfered or other sites you know of to test those skills.
Labels: new career, transfering job skills
