“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

Ever since I became a teacher, people have spouted this delightful little cliché in my direction, helpfully reminding me how this country views its teachers and its education system: as overpaid babysitters who had no real knowledge or marketable skills, and who only pursued a career in education because they couldn’t get a real job and because teaching seemed easy. (Those people have a point—it must be easy, since a mere half of all teachers quit after the first five years).

I always knew that the saying was a whole lot of hogwash, and I paid it no mind. I would leave the profession at the end of the school year and spend the summer vacation looking for other work. Surely I had marketable skills other than teaching…right? Then I began the job search and started to wonder if perhaps it was true, after all.

Every time I looked at an online job posting and saw the requirements—x amount of years in the field, x amount of technical proficiency, a certain specific degree—I felt overwhelmed. The job postings might as well have said, “We require mastery of seventy different languages, blood type O-negative, and your first child once it is born.”

I searched and searched, and the whole time I looked, a song from the musical Avenue Q ran on a constant loop in the back of my head:

What do you do with a B.A. in English?
What is my life going to be?
Four years of college
And plenty of knowledge
Have earned me this useless degree.

I had spent my college years studying literature, pursuing academic enlightenment, and analyzing rich, complex texts that challenged me and brought me joy. WHAT HAD I DONE?!

(And at the time I thought I had been pursuing a practical career path. Before switching to English Education, I was a drama major. Chew on that one for a while.)

But it was too early for me to despair. Some successful English majors include the former chair of the Ford Foundation Kathryn S. Fuller, former New York State governor Mario Cuomo, and Sally Ride, the first woman in space. That’s a sample of the wide variety of successful careers that are possible with an English degree, and a far cry from “unpublished writer/part-time waitress.” Maybe there was hope for me after all.

Now, I am secretly working in my second job as a curriculum coordinator at a company that will remain nameless. By developing classes with the instructors, I am still putting my teaching and curriculum development skills to good use. I am also gradually developing business and marketing skills that will help me in the future.

The degree you pursue in college is not necessarily going to correspond with the career path you choose in life. I never took a single marketing or business class before this year, but am blessed with the opportunity to learn these skills on the job.

Still, I didn’t simply luck into a position that business and marketing majors would love to have. I got the job because I’m a good writer.

The lesson? Don’t sell yourself short or miss exciting opportunities because of skills you think you lack. You’ve built a set of important skills in your last job, no matter what it was. Be creative in your job search, and you’ll find a position where you can exercise the fabulous skills you’ve already developed and build ones you never knew you had.

Look at me: I did find something to do with my B.A. in English!

[Photo: Ulisse Albiati/Flickr]

Ae we training our students in a way that will pay off for them and America as a whole in the future? You don’t need these articles to guess … but read them anyhow. All of this chatter is good. As someone who sits across the desk from a lot of recent college grads earnestly looking for jobs and then failing to land them (often due to “user error”), I’m more than a little bit obsessed with this topic. It’s clear that many students–regardless of where they went to school–are missing “invaluable higher order thinking and reasoning skills,” as Bob Herbert pointed out in a NYT op-ed.

True, many students have taken the initiative by following the advice of Job Interviews for Dummies and other sources in advance (it’s actually a good book, by the way). But I’ve been struck by how many interviews unravel when taken slightly off course. It’s not entirely the college students’ fault, either. These kids aren’t only stressed-out about failing job prospects (college unemployment is at an all-time high)–they are also feeling completely duped by the higher-ed “system.” A cushy college experience is not translating to a cushy job. And they know it.

Right now, the best universities are starting to integrate career management curriculum into classes so that their students get the skills while in college to go out and find multiple jobs over decades. Others are starting to add in alumni career services. Initiatives like this are good, but they are not nearly enough, both in quality and quantity.

Job-hunting programs should start at freshman orientation and be brought through all four years of college. Networking skills shouldn’t be hived off to the Greek system, because that skill is and will continue to be the number-one way to land a job. Unfortunately, it will take the giant sucking sound of cash endowments shriveling up before most colleges make real change happen. In the not-too-distant future. I imagine many college-educated alumni across the country will wake up and realize that they got ahead in their careers not because of their degree but because of their own hard work and ingenuity. And the checkbooks will close.

Many of you out there interview recent college grads and hire interns. How do you feel about this subject? What can colleges do to prepare students better for the workforce and for longer careers–where delayed retirement and job-change velocity is sure to affect them?

[Photo by Dave Herholz/flickr]