Executive sales director skills for your resume and career

Anthropologists have to be organized, independent thinkers who can take studious notes and record every detail of their surroundings.

Hard skills become very specialized across the discipline. Archaeologists HAVE to have a field school to be considered for any job. Many biological anthropologists also attend field schools to learn the hands-on skills they need in their careers. Want to work in forensics? An internship in a crime lab is vital. Museums? Internship.

You can't learn how to do the work of Anthropology from a book. It can only be learned by doing with the background knowledge that comes from classes. So students have to get internships and get on projects related to the specific fields they hope to join. In those hands-on settings, they will start to put together the things they learned in class with the dynamic world of practical anthropology.

In terms of a gap year, I recommend that international business students acquire tangible skills, relevant experience and/or certifications which will enhance their success in their desired area of interest. For example, a gap year could consist of gaining technical or digital training overseas, which would also further the students' cultural intelligence and language proficiency. These types of enriching gap year experiences will assist students to distinguish themselves in a highly competitive market. Furthermore, students should focus on broadening and maintaining their global network during a gap year in order to be ready for the job market once the gap year is concluded.

I am a strong believer in getting as many methods and research designs under your belt as possible. Students need both qualitative and quantitative skills, as well as a working knowledge of statistics (or better). Students also have to be steeped in an applied orientation that dials them into real-world problems, but also gets them thinking about other things, like leveraging careers outside the academy and the power of networks. Internships, practicums, and other forms of engaged, project-based learning are invaluable. I am convinced that applying knowledge, in the service of real-world problems and scenarios, is the only real way that students internalize knowledge and make it their own. Those experiences are also real lines on a resume that will get them jobs, down the road, after graduation.

Students also need to be trained about how to think about the transfer of their skill sets to jobs that aren't called anthropology. Few, if any jobs, get labeled as anthropology, but our skill sets fit well in many facets of government (research, policy, and analysis), museums, the corporate world (after all, Microsoft is the single largest employer of the anthropologist in the world), marketing/advertising (those organizations can teach you the mechanical tricks of the trade but they can't teach you to be deeply interested in what makes people tick), and non-profits of all stripes.

Also, students need to be attentive to the fact that diversity is at the very center of the anthropological paradigm. We are the cross-cultural specialists, more than any other social science, through our deep and nuanced understanding of culture as an analytical concept and not just a superficial slogan that gets slung around.