Career Information

a.  Link to Career Services and Job Searches:
Career Services Homepage:
www.asu.edu/career
www.clas.asu.edu/students/clasworks/
Register with career services on-line
**registration is available to current students and alumni who are in or  have completed a degree or
post-baccalaureate program at ASU. 

b. Career and Professional Skills that are developed and enhanced through the study of Philosophy 

1. General Problem-Solving
   analysis of concepts and definitions
   conceptual clarity and precision
   extract relevant information
   synthesize diverse perspectives
   organize issues and ideas
   enhanced understanding of the problem
   define the parameters of the problem
   
   
2. Communication Skills
   present ideas in structured and organized form
   develop the ability to explain difficult material
   eliminate ambiguities and vagueness in expression
   
   
3. Critical Thinking
   assess and evaluate arguments
   learn to analyze and justify claims
   learn to ask relevant questions
   
   
4. Information Management
   ability to gather information
   research and investigate the problem or issue
   identify courses of action
   
   
5. Writing skills
   Interpretive writing
   -analyze and understand challenging text
   comparative writing
   -critically examine alternative positions
   argumentative writing
   - ability to establish and justify one’s own views
   descriptive writing
   - provide detailed and concrete examples
   creativity and originality are encouraged in order to develop one’s own ideas
   
   
6. Management and Administration skills
   analyze tasks and set priorities
   identify problems
   knowledge of problem-solving procedures
   
   
7. Argument Skills
   use of argument to persuade others
   ability to reason from premises to conclusion
   assess the implications of positions
   
   

A brief excerpt from Careers for Philosophers prepared by the American Philosophical Association’s

Committee on Career Opportunities:

“Among the things people well educated in philosophy can do are the following.  They can do research on an almost unlimited variety of subjects;  they can, for instance, get information and organize it.  They can write clearly, and effectively.  They can communicate well, usually both orally and in writing.  They can generate ideas on many different sorts of problems.  They can formulate and solve problems.  They can elicit hidden assumptions and articulate overlooked alternatives.  They can persuade people to take unfamiliar views or novel options seriously.  They can summarize complicated materials without undue simplification. They can formulate and defend policies on a wide range of important issues in business, education, social legislation, and other areas.  They can integrate diverse data and construct useful analogies.  They can distinguish subtle differences without overlooking similarities. They can also adapt to change, a capacity of growing importance in the light of rapid advances in so many fields.  And well-educated philosophers can usually teach what they know to others.  This ability is especially valuable at a time when training and retraining are so often required by rapid technological changes. 

The representative abilities just mentioned are quite general, but they bear directly on the range of careers for which philosophers are prepared.  Philosophers have the skills necessary for an enormous range of non-academic jobs, given an orientation period or a course of specialty training.   To be sure, non-academic job descriptions do not normally call for the patterns of capacities specially developed by philosophical education.  Indeed, often the sorts of capacities cited above are not even mentioned in such descriptions or in advertisements of non-academic positions.  But with greater and greater frequency we are hearing and reading of complaints by employers about deficiencies in these capacities.  We often hear from business leaders, for example, that many of their employees do not write or speak well, cannot communicate effectively, and lack imagination, ideas, and insight.  Moreover, it is these sorts of capacities (together with certain traits of personality) which, for a very wide spectrum of non-academic careers, contribute most to success.

There is, then, a serious information gap in many quarters of our society.  We are experiencing a trend toward more and more specialty training simultaneously with more and more protests about weaknesses in basic education.  Granted, specialty training, and certainly specialized knowledge, is needed for a great many jobs, including many likely to interest philosophers.  But much of the requisite knowledge can be acquired on the job, and some can be obtained by philosophers while they are teaching and by philosophy students along the way to their degrees.  The point is that the kind of basic education which philosophical training provides is eminently useful in some major aspects of virtually any occupation, and in most of the major aspects of the higher-level non-academic positions likely to interest philosopher.” (pp. 310 – 311)

 c. Sample Areas of Employment 

Business

• Advertising Executive
• Manager, Hotel
• Development Manager
• Manpower Services Coordinator

Computers

• Computer Systems Analyst
• Consultant
• Owner, Computer Firm
• Programmer
• Technical Writer                                                                                   

Consulting

• In Business
• In Education
• In Publishing

Education

• Admissions Officer
• Archivist
• College President
• Dean
• Educational Tester
• Humanities Bibliographer
• Librarian
• Residence Hall Director
• Provost

Finance

• Bank Officer
• Investment Broker
• Tax Accountant

Government (Federal)

• Armed Forces Officer
• CIA Staff Member
• Congressional Staff Member
• Diplomat
• Immigration Service Staff Member
• Policy Analyst
• Policy and Planning Consultant
• United Nations Official

Government (Local)

• Director, Human Services Agency
• County Commissioner
• County Supervisor 

Journalism

• Freelance writer
• Executive Editor (magazine)

Law

• Attorney
• Officer, Legal Aid Society
• Director of Communications
• Legal Researcher
• Paralegal Assistant                                                                       

Medicine

• Hospital Administrator
• Nurse
• Nursing Administrator
• Physician                                                                                   

Publishing

• Director, University Press
• Editor, University Press
• Editor, Commercial Press                                   

Research

• Business
•  Education
• Government
• Scientific