Humanities professor skills for your resume and career

As professionals with expertise in the past, our best contribution is to help people see history from a non-presentist point of view. Presentism tends to judge history with our present values and morals, which highly prevents us from understanding the studied period itself. While this type of judgment is debunked at a synchronic level -we don't apply our values spatially- we still see examples of this perspective diachronically applied when comparing different periods to ours. Judging history this way is unfair to the period we are analyzing. It can also lead us to dismiss significant advancements as just backward attitudes because, of course, everything that happened before us will look "obsolete" to our eyes. Although we can see a particular event in history as something negative according to our standards, it could have represented a major step ahead for the world at that moment. So, for professionals who deal with previous ages, connecting humans across time and not only across space is a priceless skill nowadays. With the vast increase in scholarship on the past, we will need more professionals able to transport people from one period to the other and help them understand its importance in the whole picture of a specific human group or the whole of humankind. This is what will allow us to value our present correctly. The most precious soft skill for everyone is often to try to understand before judging. Connectors are a great source of creativity and growth.

For Medievalists and Early Modern experts, depending on their area of expertise, it is imperative to know the skills they will need in their research, such as paleography, to give an example. In general terms, it is crucial to understand the age at which we live for all those who want to have a career in this field. We are in a moment when the "digital" adjective is being applied to everything, and this is an excellent tool for anyone interested in the past. Digitality is a new platform that allows us to present information in a much more complex and attractive way, and more importantly, to reach many more people interested in knowing how we got here. From being able to contribute to digital repositories, turning into digital format documents of any type, to being able to work with different programs to find and process information, such as corpus analysis, being acquainted with these new technologies will be the feature that will set professionals apart from more analogical fellows.

To put it bluntly, if you want to make money, this is really not the career for you.