Content strategy: a job for interesting people
As someone with an English degree, I sometimes sustain a playful ribbing by those with specific, technical degrees like mechanical engineering, accounting or even the ever-fracturing computer science degree. Often, I’ll just laugh and play along, but sometimes I’ll defend my choice in the liberal arts.
It’s become even easier the last few years to stick up for my degree since becoming a content strategist. Gone is the trope of an English degree being for those who are uncertain what career to pursue after college — content strategy is a booming, growing field in a lucrative industry.
And best yet, we need English majors.
What’s so great about an English degree? There’s a great Reddit thread in /r/writing from a few years ago where an English major Redditor said it best:
An English major learns to appreciate each and everything they learn. They often complain their major is useless because they are pulling so much from their other classes … They aren’t forgetting their classes — they are actively incorporating them, as well as any life experience or information gained, in what they do … They learn to frame everything that is and everything they are into what they are doing … It sets up the environment to truly learn and incorporate the world around you in your writing.
(Link, with some mildly NSFW language)
It’s true — English majors learn a discipline, not a craft. Here are just a few things we learn, perhaps better than anyone:
- We can easily assimilate complicated ideas through writing, and learn the nuances of presenting an argument in a structured, logical way.
- We learn how to receive abstract criticism or feedback and adapt our framing to just as abstractly convey a different meaning.
- We learn the subtleties of writing for a certain audience.
- Perhaps most importantly, we learn to respect and harness the power of words.
My wife (who was herself an English major) said, “Some people don’t go to college to get a job; they go to college to become an interesting person.”
But what happens after I graduate?
Content strategy, as a formalized discipline, was in its nascency when I graduated in 2006. I certainly didn’t know about it—I wanted to be a newspaper journalist.
Right around that time, every print publication I was interested in was not hiring, and often were laying off entire teams of people. I turned elsewhere.
My unpaved career path led me through nonprofit management, social media marketing, web development project management, and eventually to being a content strategist at Facebook.
And — lo and behold! — I use my English-majory skills every day: Breaking down complicated and nuanced ideas? Check. Putting structure and logic to abstract ideas? Check. Harnessing the power of words to inform and persuade? Yep, that too.
(I also picked up some skills along the way — UX design, light front-end coding, and learning how to hone my inner passion for information architecture, taxonomy and data science.)
College students majoring in English: don’t let those future accountants and software engineers get you down. There are great jobs for you after college. More than a dozen on our content strategy team at Facebook have English degrees.
They’re gainfully employed, yes. But perhaps more importantly — like you, they are interesting people.
Be sure to check out stories from my colleagues Sara Getz, Grant Shellen, Elena Ontiveros and Jonathon Colman about their paths to content strategy
