Sunday, March 26, 2006

 

What makes us different...

Thanks for the description, Roy.

All I can think of that needs to be included is that we are postgrads from the Humanities and Social Sciences.

A repeated criticism of human sciences training is that too often it is an irrelevant scholarly endeavour: just “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”. Add a dose of skepticism from industry about the value of human science training in terms of direct economic or political benefit and the result is precarious career prospects for humanities and social science students.

The case is worse for those humanities and social science students who will graduate from academic programmes that are not specifically oriented to meet the needs of an industry or profession. A 2003 HSRC (Human Sciences Research Council) study tracked the job-hunting progress of 2 672 graduates who obtained their first degrees between 1990 and 1998. The type of qualifications held by graduates was also highlighted by the HSRC study. Graduates from the humanities and the arts had the highest unemployment rate, at almost 47%. Graduates in medical science had the highest success rate in finding employment (79%) followed by engineering graduates (77%).

There are no other similar interventions out there that look at how 'people like us' should re-package knowledge for the workplace. So the fact that Humanities and Social Sciences people are doing this through the World of Work Programmes, and through this blog, makes us unique.

What do you all think?

Lesley

Comments:
Being one of those students, I couldn't agree more. Thanks for putting our thoughts down in words Lesley. The statistics make me nervous, but I have spoken to many professional businessmen about this subject, and they kept on stressing the fact how students like us are needed more and more to add depth and insight into projects. For example, there are two areas I'm quite interested in. That is political risk/business intelligence or even corporate communication. And believe me, our type of degrees are ideal for these areas. And together with this programme, we will stand out from the rest of the crowd. Like Lesley said, we are unique!
 
Seeing these statistics, i am also worried but i think we can add some value to the corporate world.
Thank you Lesley.
 
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