How Interdisciplinary Arts And Humanities Degrees Amplify Career Prospects For Indian Students

When students come from India to the UK to study in our universities, they’re often pursuing subjects like Business, Engineering, or Computing Science. Those subjects feel to be on a safe track towards a steady income and a secure life.

It’s a relative minority of students who pursue Arts and Humanities subjects. But in the knowledge economy of the future, I’m not worried about these students’ career prospects.

What makes Arts and Humanities graduates successful?

The answer is simple. The world needs stories. It always has and it always will. And to make stories, we need storytellers. That’s what the Arts and Humanities gradutes create.

Every part of our economy needs storytellers. It’s obvious that filmmakers, TV producers, or games designers need stories. But all businesses need stories. They need narratives that link their ethos, customers, and products to make that emotional connection with a brand that builds loyalty. "Narrative is a fundamental and indispensable set of skills in business in the twenty-first century," concludes a 2022 report produced by Oxford University Department of Education.

It’s not only in the commercial world that stories are vital. Politicians and policy-makers need stories that help us to make sense of their politics and policies. And they need to be able to make an impact in the fastmoving media landscape - to capture attention with stories that resonate.

Stories link us to our past and history too, which makes them vital for heritage organisations and museums. Perhaps most importantly they point to our future. Imagining a more equitable and greener future is going to be crucial in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development goals. Then we need a story that tells us how we can get there and helps to bring people along with it. Stories, in that sense, literally have the power to save the planet.

How does the study of Arts and Humanities enable our graduates to become storytellers?

Stories aren’t fabricated out of nowhere. Some stories are built of facts, analyses, arguments, critical thinking, and interpretation of evidence within rigorous conceptual frameworks. These are the skills you’ll learn on most Humanities degrees.

But you learn how to make those stories compelling, too. You might be studying some of the best stories ever created, learning why they work and how they are put together. You’re learning the art of great communication. A 2020 British Academy report noted that communication skills were among the top skills employers valued to ‘thrive in 21st century work’.

I’m talking quite holistically about the way Arts and Humanities degrees set students up for careers in the global Creative Industries. Creative Industries broadly refer to any area where human creative work can be turned to economic benefit. According to the UN Creative Economy Outlook 2022 report, the creative economy generated 50 million jobs worldwide and employs ‘more young people (15-29 year-olds) than other sectors’. A recent major report has begun to map the colossal scale of the opportunity presented by the Creative Industries in India specifically. This includes the publishing, advertising and film sectors, and also sub-sectors within the IT sector, such as animation, visual effects, and games.

The intersection of technology and creativity is already a huge driver of growth. In the future, I don’t think there’ll be digital technology on the one side and Arts and Humanities on the other. They’ll be fused. If in the future much of the technical work involved in making a film, TV show, or game can be done by AI, it will be those who have the creative vision to direct AI to produce content that will be most important. That’s the storyteller again.

This is one of the most exciting developments in the Arts and Humanities across the world today. We're increasingly seeing courses developed that bring creative and technological curriculums together, or which work with industry partners to define the suite of interdisciplinary digital and storytelling skills our graduates need to future-proof their careers and to write for an array of emerging media. I cannot wait to see the stories that this new wave of Arts and Humanities graduates tell in a whole host of careers.

The author is Lecturer, School of Literature, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East Anglia, UK.