What's in a Degree? Making my Arts Degree Skills Visible
What skills did I actually gain from a degree in Drama & Theatre Arts?
Many skills are gained in the course of doing a degree. Such skills are often not explicitly articulated, however. Which makes them invisible.
The skills gained may also not align with expectations associated with the name of the degree. I have a degree in Drama & Theatre Arts but the skills I gained from that study span a range of disciplines. I might have gained some of them from a degree focusing on:
Politics
Social sciences
Marketing
Human Resource Management
Human-Computer Interaction
User Design
Psychology
Philosophy
And others
I’m not suggesting I have deep expertise in any of these subjects but the focus of my degree in Drama & Theatre Arts inevitably meant engaging with and studying the disciplines listed above. This is because it was about the study of:
People
Interactions
Society
And learning how to use theatre/media-based practices to shape:
Behaviours
Experiences
Outcomes
What’s in a degree?
A recruiter/employer wouldn’t know any of this though because during the hiring process, all they would see is the name of my degree.
Imagine: If you were a recruiter, what would you assume?
I suspect it would be something like: she knows how to act, perhaps how to direct, maybe write plays…
It’s unlikely you would be aware that I had studied any of the disciplines listed above or had numerous transferable skills that could be applied in a range of domains.
Why would you? In terms of my degree, those skills are invisible.
Making my skills visible
To take a look at how such skills might be made visible, I thought I would share aspects of my degree-based skills story to demonstrate how skills I developed could be articulated.
I discussed some of these in my last post, “How does a drama degree lead to a career in tech?” and showed how the skills from one domain (Drama/Theatre) could be applied to another (Tech).
In the table below I unpack some of the knowledge-based skills further and identify transferable skills that particular practices helped me develop and how I have applied them in my work.
Knowledge > transferable > applied skills
In the following table, I describe:
Knowledge: Specific knowledge I developed from my degree
Transferable skills: Transferable skills I gained from that knowledge that can be applied to different domains
Applied skills: Examples of work I have applied the skills to
Case study: Applying systems thinking
Developing software using human-centred design
To provide an example of how I have applied one of the skills cited above, the following case study demonstrates the skill in action.
Example: In 2014 I worked with the Open Badges team at Mozilla to develop blueprints for digital badge-based pathways to employment. This involved conceptualising and developing a prototype of a digital tool.
Challenge: The challenge the project aimed to address was how to improve access to a wide range of careers for socio-economically disadvantaged young people. Our research showed that a range of socio-economic factors could impact individuals achieving positive career and life goals. These included:
Lack of access to information about a wide range of careers
Opportunities often limited to local area due to cost of travel
Lack of awareness of their skills and what careers they mapped to
Solution: We sought to develop a mobile-first technology solution that would:
Help young people identify and validate their skills with digital badges
Enable employers to plot job skills they need as digital badges
Match young people’s skills to jobs and enable them to pave pathways to employment with their digital badges
I collaborated with a team of learning specialists and software developers to design the prototype. To gain an insight to the people we were developing the software for, we developed personas. These provided us with profiles of typical users and let us metaphorically stand in their shoes.
Building a picture of different users’ wants and needs, provided a starting point for decision making about the tool’s features. It helped us define what would be needed to encourage engagement with the tool, understand how different users would interact with it, and requirements for the user experience to make it accessible and appealing to different types of users.
User research with employers, employees and young people helped us refine the system design strategy, while testing and feedback from them informed iterations of the tool.
Outcome: Using techniques that helped us imagine use of the tool from the perspective of different users, helped us ‘build in’ and consider their different wants, needs and motivations from the start. This multi-perspective view helped us consider, for example, how features developed for one set of users could have consequences for another set of users' impression of the tool, and so helped us shape something that could work for all. Developments stemmed from this awareness and were further refined through user research and testing.
The prototype served as an early example of how skills-based technology solutions could be developed to identify and validate skills, automatically match people to jobs and deliver skills pathways they could follow to employment.
Skills-based lesson
I applied relevant skills developed during the course of my degree in this role. However… if the title of my degree alone had been used to recruit me to the project, it’s unlikely I would have been hired. A drama degree to developing tech…?
It was work experience and community contribution to the open source-based work of the team prior to me joining them for this project that provided them with insights about my skills.
This highlights a gap when it comes to understanding capability developed through a degree or similar qualification. As my skills were not explicitly stated in a degree transcript or suggested by the degree title, those skills were hidden.
My skills story
I have shared this degree-based skills story to demonstrate how:
The skills developed during the course of a degree might differ from expectations
How such skills are often invisible
How invisible skills can be made visible by articulating, evidencing and sharing them
Why does this matter?
Because as recruiters increasingly turn to skills-based hiring, skills awareness and skills visibility are essential to signal capabilities and drive discovery and discoverability for jobs.
What invisible skills could you articulate from your degree or other life / learning experiences?
I provide various skills-based consulting services. If you‘d like to explore how we can work together, please get in touch by contacting me here.
Skills-based hiring series
This post is part of a series on skills-based hiring. Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts.