Campus to Career: Linking Liberal Arts Education to Success

This past September, George Anders, senior editor at LinkedIn and author of You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education, visited JMU to share his expertise and advice during a campus-wide event and in smaller group and classroom settings.  

Shannon Wilson, CAL’s Director of Professional Development and Engagement, designed and orchestrated the ambitious itinerary, guided by a vision that Anders himself describes as “bold, dynamic and extremely practical.” 

During the large event in Wilson Auditorium, Anders fielded questions from students, faculty, staff and the public about transferrable skills, the future of liberal arts programs and how Artificial Intelligence programs like ChatGPT will impact the future workforce, among other topics.  

The conversation was guided by student moderators Noel James Okoth (‘23) and Sam Game (‘24), who Anders said “asked engaging, incisive questions [and] showed tremendous poise on stage.” He stressed that liberal arts graduates have skills that are needed in every sector. Like CAL alumni now working in a variety of professions, our students can find meaningful work in any industry they desire. Smaller events enabled Anders to give more targeted advice. He spoke with faculty and staff about how to support students beginning to think about careers and with employers about how to recruit liberal arts students. He also joined two different classes to engage students on topics especially relevant to each course.  

With Ryan Alessi’s SMAD 101: Intro to Media Arts and Design class, Anders addressed the importance of writing, the influence books and publishing still have on media and the processes of writing a book and working with a publisher to bring the book to market.  

In Lori Britt’s SCOM 447: Facilitating Public and Organizational Engagement Processes class, Anders consulted with students to create a Facilitator Discussion Guide for leading conversations about the critical thinking skills that employers desire and a liberal arts education cultivates. 

Anders subsequently published "Putting connections to work: A student playbook for LinkedIn” featuring JMU students whom he met during his visit. “None of this would have been possible without Shannon’s leadership,” Anders writes. “Meetings happened on time; the right people were there; the sound system worked and a hundred other details all fell into place with perfection. I've done many such campus visits in the past decade. I'd nominate the JMU experience [...] as a model of how to get everything right.”