Creating a Gem of a Career

Embrace the Liberal Arts (Again)

Solid communication skills, analytical thinking, and being a quick study are the new keys to success. Ironically, these are staples of the classic liberal-arts education. This is in marked contrast to the ever-more-specialized approach that some of today's college degrees take. That UMass Amherst degree in building materials and wood technology? Hard to believe it's going to last you a lifetime.

Even a degree with a bit more mass appeal, such as communications, shows how quickly things change. If you graduated even three years ago, such emerging niche media as blogs, podcasts, and satellite radio are all new to you. Each requires a different approach, and you have to develop specialized tactics to get your message across. Whatever specifics you learned in school are hopelessly out of date.

"As world economies come up and the environment gets ever more competitive, the U.S. educational infrastructure is struggling to keep up," says Gautam Godhwani, CEO of online job aggregator SimplyHired.com. Many of today's exciting jobs (Java developer, brand-experience designer) didn't really exist 10 years ago. And the exciting professions of tomorrow have yet to be imagined. As a result, what we need from our education has changed. "What you want to learn is how to learn," says Taleo's Snell. And that's where the liberal-arts education becomes valuable again.

Labor trends point to the increasing importance of adaptability. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker currently holds 10 different jobs before hitting age 40. Job tenures now hover around four years. Forrester Research's Claire Schooley predicts these numbers will only get more extreme, anticipating that today's youngest workers will hold 12 to 15 jobs in their lifetimes.

One way to approach lifelong learning is to think about what's threatening your job or your company. "Everyone can articulate what they're threatened by," says Rob McGovern, author of Bring Your 'A' Game. "Years ago, when I worked at HP, a few people went to Microsoft. We worried about what Microsoft was doing. If you're at Microsoft today, you're worrying about Google. Go find out about the thing that threatens you. Understand it. You might pick the wrong company, but what you will learn will always be valuable." The bottom line? If your degree gets you in the door, it's your experiential résumé that will take you to the executive suite.

Harness Your Inner (Mini) Mogul

Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson aren't the only ones who should be juggling multihyphenate careers. We may not all manage clothing lines and signature fragrances along with our pop-singing starlet gigs, but we will all need to start thinking of ourselves as one-person empires.

As we stay in the workforce longer, it's going to take more to keep us interested, which may mean keeping fingers in several different career pies. Jeremy Bieger, a 29-year-old senior manager of interactive marketing for American Express, has a pretty cool job. Got an AmEx corporate card? When you go online to access any of its services, Bieger is the one designing your experience. He's a rising star, having already been promoted since joining the company in 2004, and has won an internal innovators award for creating a Mac "widget" that could help customers manage balances from their many accounts all over the Web.

Bieger created that widget for fun, in his spare time. And last fall, he coproduced a friend's music album and also collaborated and performed in a performance-art show--involving original music compositions, dances, and video art--in Brooklyn's trendy Williamsburg neighborhood. Bieger's not some frenetic, obsessive overachiever with no time for a personal life. He's happily married and quite soft-spoken. A double major in economics and music composition at Oberlin in the late 1990s, Bieger simply sees these activities as different parts of who he is. "It all has to do with creating something," he says. "I see a lot of people who work a lot of late nights and burn out. I don't feel that way. I see myself as a collaborator and an ideas guy. It's all about going from the idea to the creation of some living, breathing thing." Whether that's a piece of music, a video, or an interactive Web site, for Bieger it's part of creating an elegant performance and staying energized.

We need to feed the different parts of our personality, because one job may not provide all of the satisfaction we need from work.