I can't stress this enough - we really need to continue to have people with humanities
degrees coming in to all sectors in business.
If we look at where productivity gains are coming from businesses over the next 20 years,
they're not going to be your traditional routes.
OK?
They're going to come from the productivity gains we can get through AI and machine learning
and part of that is going to be those that have the hard data skills.
Absolutely.
But the majority of it is going to be coming from people that can analyse and understand
broad spectrums of data.
To be able to work out what that data means.
To synthesise that into a cogent argument and to be able to know how to move that forward.
So, AI is great for providing you with information but you need people that can then use that
and these are going to be people with true leadership skills.
My name is Verity Stokes.
I'm a director with the recruitment group Angela Mortimer and I work between our Birmingham
office Katie Bard and also our London office which is Angela Mortimer.
I studied Medieval Studies at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 2003, a long
time ago!
Considering I graduated 18 years ago I can't tell you how much I still remember about it.
It's phenomenal.
It was 3 years of my life which seemed to have had an impact over the last 20 years
of my life.
I got to do an awful lot in a very short space of time.
And still now, some of my best friends, and also a lot of my very close business contacts,
come from people that I met when I studied here.
I still do recruitment - that's the thing that's super-important to me.
So I still meet clients, I still interview candidates.
I love the fact that I have a sense of what's really happening in the market at the moment,
which allows me to make much more informed decisions for me and my team and our business
on where we're going, but also to be able to offer that proper consultancy service to
the people that we work with as well.
If you have imagine what we're taught to do is look at information, understand - I'm going
to steal this quote but it's understand the wood and the trees, ok?
So, it's not just looking at the immediate, it's looking at the broader sense of it as
well.
So we need to analyse all that, understand all that.
And we need to be able to have a sense of what's coming next.
So that kind of probability theory or likelihood theory is what informs us as leaders in business
about how we make the decisions that we do to move forward.
Now, historians particularly are trained in that in a really unique way.
A lot of the clients that I work with in our London office which are hedge funds, financial
services, private equity, consultancy firms, they come from a history background.
They are asking us for history degrees.
There's one consultancy we work with - they won't work with somebody that's come out of
anything other than a humanities degree.
And they are a financial consultancy.
So, it's super super essential that the qualities and the traits that we train into historians
and into other humanities degrees as well, like English, like Law, like Drama, that we're
able to use that as we bring it into the future.
And there are hard skills that come out of it as well, absolutely.
The ability to be able to work well, together with people to put your ideas forward, to
come up with a conclusion which is also very important - this is true particularly I think
of history and English actually.
It's to understand your point, come to a cogent argument and be able to persuasively get that
across whilst also understanding and respecting others around you.
When you're sitting at board level that is absolutely essential.
And as you know, more than anything else, employers are looking for people that can
work to deadlines.
This sounds silly but when you're working on a project you need to be able to work to
that deadline.
Your client isn't going to wait for you because you need to do something else.
And certainly when I studied history it was the one thing I honed, somewhat to the fine
line at times, that I honed the ability to say ok, you know what, we've got to work under
pressure here.
Either I've got a long strategic project that I'm working on like a dissertation which I
have to consider over a long period of time and be able to parcel my time up accordingly
to make sure it's delivered on time or I'm working under a super-pressured environment
where I have four hours to get across all the information that I need.
and so the qualities that you get from doing a humanities degree are really really useful
when you go into actual business and actual work because you can't say "Oh I'm so sorry,
can I have a bit longer please?".
It just doesn't work that in real life, so it does allow you to be able to learn that
and to practice that.
And not always to deliver it when you're at university, sometimes you don't always hit
the deadline, but you know what you don't do it every time and once you've done it once,
you remember not to do it again.
And when you go into the world of work you are already ten steps ahead.