Back when I was going to school, all the well meaning folks in my family had a lot of opinions about my degree choice. How would I find work? Did I know it probably wouldn’t pay anything? Did I know most people don’t actually succeed in this field? Didn’t I think I should study something actually useful?
Sigh. Good thing I’m great at ignoring people after I set my sights on something.
It’s funny though, I’ve found that not only are a lot of things I was warned about not true, there are also some perks to working in the arts and getting a degree in these fields that we don’t talk about very often.
Job Security is Gone, Hopping Jobs Increases Your Pay
I left school in 2008, which all know was a great year for the economy. With my theater degree, I walked out of school and onto a cruise ship for the next five years, where I paid off most of my student loans and built a lot of useful resume skills.
A lot of my friends with “safe” degrees in things like business and finance were pretty screwed during those years.
The point really though is that you never know what curveball the future holds. No jobs are guaranteed (with the possible exception of trade skills/blue collar jobs).
Society has even moved along to the point where people in all walks of life hop from job to job repeatedly throughout their career. For those of us in the arts, we always knew that would be the way things were going to be, so we never had to deal with the loss of that sense of security.
Access to Jobs with Housing
While this isn’t unique to the arts, we do have an abundance of jobs that provide housing, especially when taking little regional contracts at the beginning of your career. If you’re adventurous and willing to spend some time in foreign countries, there are also a lot of gigs that pay well and provide housing in Asia and the Middle East, not to mention the plethora of tours, cruise ships jobs and amusement parks that house their employees.
Creative Jobs Are Harder to Outsource
As technology keeps advancing, a lot of jobs are becoming obsolete. Jobs that interact heavily with humans and that require creative mindsets are actually becoming more secure than jobs that can be outsourced to a computer.
Accounting may have seemed like a safe bet, but how many people use TurboTax now?
Even when you look at career paths like coding, a coder who also had graphic design skills is going to be far more in demand than a person who doesn’t have that creative mindset.
Creative Thinking is a Serious Business Skill
Increasingly, businesses want people who can think outside the box and offer creative problem solving.
Creative thinking is also a skill that we develop without even thinking about it in the theater. Think of the five weirdest problems you’ve ever solved while working on a production. Now, what are the odds you won’t be able to think of five different ways to solve a simple business issue?
It may sound obvious to folks who work in the arts, but there are actually a lot of people out there who don’t know how to just attack a problem until it’s solved. As this post puts it, “creativity is a muscle you can strengthen with the right tools.” If you’ve been working in the arts, you’ve pretty much been at the creativity gym for years.
If you type creative thinking and business into Google, you get a ridiculous quantity of hits from some no-name places like Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, as well as a bunch of business think tanks.
And if you’ve ever been in a production meeting, you’ll probably recognize an awful lot of things these articles discuss as things people in the arts just do without even thinking about it.
Here are two good articles on the subject:
People Skills Are a Serious Business Skill
You would be astonished at how many people have no people skills. This isn’t true of most people who work in the arts.
As a group, we have a wide variety of different personality types. Even if you look at just the stereotypes of actor, director, designer, musician, and stage manager personalities, that’s a pretty wide spread.
And yet we all know how to pull it together and work towards a common goal. Stage managers are especially skilled at navigating this wide variety of personalities.
We have the advantage of being people who think in terms of teams. We know it takes a team to build a show. We know how to work hard at mastering our own skills while still acknowledging the needs of other master workers and the necessity of their contributions to make our shows a success.
We’re also pretty good at positive attitudes because we have dealt with nearly impossible odds on a regular basis when trying to get shows up and we have seen a lot of crazy ideas work.
Check these out:
- 5 People Skills You Need to Succeed in Any Career
- Important Interpersonal Skills That Employers Value
Things change and society seems to be moving towards a culture that values creative applications to the traditional work force in a way that it hasn’t always in the past.
With this in mind, an arts degree can be a really excellent tool even if you plan to transition into the business world one day.
