Tech

So You Majored In English. Can You Still Get A Job At Google?

The answer depends on what positions you're interested in

May. 11th, 2021
So You Majored In English. Can You Still Get A Job At Google?

Big tech companies have long been considered highly attractive places to work. They pay well, offer top notch perks, and are full of talented people working on difficult technical problems. Being tech companies, most of their workforce is composed of jobs that require technical skills.

But technical jobs are not the only jobs in big tech. While these companies are filled with engineers and programmers, their workforce composition also includes employees who studied things like history, philosophy or English. What do those people do at these companies?

Below, using the Revelio Labs job taxonomy, we list the top jobs that people get hired into from the humanities:

Job Titles in Big Tech from Humanities Backgrounds

Notably, things are changing. Non-technical roles are becoming a much smaller share of the workforce composition at big tech, our workforce intelligence software shows:

Share of New Hires into Non-Technical Jobs

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We further see in this job report that employees with non-technical backgrounds stay for 15% longer than their more technical counterparts. Further diagnostic analytics would likely show that this is at least partly because of a more limited set of exit options:

Average Tenure by Background

Takeaways:

  • While tech companies are filled with technical workers, there are many jobs available for a non-technical audience, as our job taxonomy can illustrate.
  • That said, jobs at big tech are becoming more and more competitive, and the requirements for these roles are becoming increasingly technical.
  • People with a non-technical background stay longer at tech companies. Perhaps they are more loyal or like the work more, but we think further diagnostic analytics would show that this pattern is likely driven by a smaller set of outside opportunities.

If you have any ideas of other metrics to track or would like to hear more about this job report or Revelio Labs workforce intelligence software in general, please feel free to reach out.

author

Ben Zweig

CEO

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