(Chilliwack) Mar 17 – There’s a common misconception that people with liberal arts degrees end up serving coffee because the knowledge gained has no practical use. But a project led by Dr. Linda Pardy in partnership with UFV’s Community Health and Social Innovation (CHASI) Hub is serving up something different.

“Everyone says that, and it’s absolutely not true,” says Pardy, an associate professor in arts and integrated studies. “Look up who’s running many of our largest companies, and they have liberal arts degrees in disciplines such as English, philosophy, history, psychology, geography, sociology or art history. We need to tell our students, and the community, that story and not contribute to the misconception.”

Pardy teamed with Dr. Michael Batu and Dr. Michael Maschek, both associate professors in economics, to conduct research that reveals dozens of pathways for liberal arts grads and provides reliable labour market and economic information needed to make informed education-to-employment decisions. They form the nucleus of the Career and Learning for Life (CALL) consortium, a research cluster that works closely with the team at CHASI. For their first project, they’ve launched a career mapping tool that presents myriad possibilities in an interactive and visually appealing way.

What good is a history degree for someone who’s interested in banking? Look it up and you may be surprised.

“The finance industry loves history grads,” Pardy says enthusiastically. “They can train them on all the investment packages and things like that, but history grads have knowledge of what’s happened in the past that helps them understand what’s likely to happen in the future. While a business grad might get overly excited about a spike in the financial market, and depressed when it comes back down, a history grad brings stability and global thinking to decision making. They work well as collaborators with business teams.”

Over more than two years, the Career Mapping team sifted through far more than the basic data provided through Statistics Canada and B.C. Student Outcomes.

Is someone who excels in their high school geography class destined to become a social studies teacher? Look up humanities in the career mapping tool and you’ll see that’s just one of 155 career possibilities. You can pursue 105 of these careers with the degree alone, while another 50 require more education, but the search reveals no shortage of choices.

“The career mapping tool doesn’t narrow down your options, it expands them,” Pardy explains.

She looks forward to bridging the mapping tool with an economic dashboard, currently under development, that provides eastern Fraser Valley-focused data on factors such as job openings, cost-of-living information, and housing markets.

“We want to get at the granular data for what’s happening in Abbotsford, Mission, and Chilliwack,” Pardy says. “Dr. Batu and Dr Mascheck want people to see for themselves what’s growing and what’s not growing, and how this data can help them make informed decisions. They hope to give people, business owners, local government, and policy makers better decision-making tools.”