We've Been Telling Students to Career Build. The Data Says We Should Have Been Telling Them to Skill Build.
- Trina Martin
- 34 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Every spring, in counselor offices and at kitchen tables across the country, a version of the same conversation happens. A student who loves theater or band or visual arts is gently nudged toward something more "practical." Another elective that points more directly toward a career. The fine arts get framed as something you do if you love it, not something every student actually needs.
I've been pushing back on that for years, and Forbes just published data that makes the case better than I ever could.
LinkedIn tracked 2022 to 2024 graduates and measured which college majors produced students who successfully landed jobs across the widest range of industries. Visual and Performing Arts came in at number two, with 68% of graduates working in fields well outside their major. That puts arts graduates ahead of Business and Marketing, Computer and Information Sciences, Engineering, and every other major on the list except English. The major parents most often see as impractical turns out to be the second most adaptable major in the entire workforce data set.
Here's what I think that number is actually telling us. Fine arts students don't just learn their craft over years of participation. They learn how to learn. They learn to take hard feedback in front of an audience and come back the next day better. They learn what it means to be part of something where everyone has to show up or the whole thing falls apart, to read a room, to adjust in real time, to deliver under pressure even when nothing goes as planned. Those are not arts skills. Those are human skills, and they transfer into every room and every industry and every career that hasn't been invented yet.
This generation is not going to follow a straight line from a declared major to a lifetime career. They're going to pivot and adapt and rebuild, sometimes more than once. So the real question isn't which career to prepare them for. It's which skills will serve them no matter what comes next. And the data keeps pointing back to the same answer that fine arts teachers have been living out in their classrooms all along.
I've been making this argument for a while now, in keynote rooms and most recently in front of a camera in Chicago talking about why fine arts teachers and the students they develop matter more right now than they ever have. What's changing is that the data is finally loud enough to cut through the noise. Skill building is the strategy. Fine arts is where it happens. Share this with a parent who's about to have that kitchen table conversation, because they need to see it before they decide.
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