English Majors Make Great Business Managers

Often when a college student is asked what their major is and they declare "English," it is not uncommon to get the response, "and what are you going to do with that?"

Now, most English majors dream of writing or teaching, sure, but that doesn't work out for us all. Especially when the graduate does not plan on or have the means to go on to graduate school, they'd better have something that they can fall back on.

Majoring in English will give more benefit than simply living in the world of literary bliss for life. For instance, an English major would make a good business manager.

You heard me right.

A professor of mine once said, "If there were no disagreement, all English departments would be disbanded and the professors put on unemployment insurance - the discipline would cease to exist."

True enough. I feel that in English courses, especially the more one takes, the more highly skilled the student becomes at the fine art of the exploration of ideas.
Now how does this work into business management?

English majors are well known for their expertise in critical thinking. Who better, then, to lead a discussion? To brainstorm? To work through problems thus toward creative solutions?

Not that an English major is the best suited for team-think. They're not. But to process ideas, think through them in the most thorough of analytical manner, well, they're most proficient at that. Thus enabling them to be well suited for the role of leading others, and executing decisions after a process of sorting through all of the complex little interwoven issues of a problem.

Aside from their different ways of thinking, an English major is going to be well suited in the way of making presentations, both written and oral. Not that an English major is a good speaker - more often than not, the more educated a student of English, the more sharply honed the writing skills become. They are more apt to sort out ideas well to put on paper, but aren't the best at expressing ideas orally, at least not on the fly.