Building bridges from humanities to industry: An investigation of job advertisements in professional writing careers

This project seeks to better articulate the value of a humanities education to those outside our classrooms, including employers. A first step in this process is to better understand the knowledge and skills employers are looking for in new graduates who enter the writing workforce. Toward this end, we examine job postings in professional writing fields to identify ways in which employers define workplace needs, examining both the skills required as well as the language used in job advertisements.  This knowledge can inform how we help students package their humanities training and education into marketable skills for the workplace and, in turn, enable graduates to shape their workplaces.  This knowledge is also imperative to securing successful careers for our students and building a workplace that benefits from the critical thinking, creative, ethically-conscious abilities that humanities students are especially able to provide.  If we value the central role that the humanities plays in our students’ development as public citizens, a development that is immersed in a world of ever-evolving communication technologies, we must be able to articulate the significance of our work to those outside the humanities fields, especially those hiring our students.