Managerial tasks bring a nice extra challenge to my work. I have enjoyed managing both businesses and people. In fact, I think that humanists have a lot to offer in corporate management, but unfortunately the world of business doesn't seem to understand this.

What else is there to being a manager but doing analyses, figuring out the big picture, making managerial decisions and forming plans for action, critically evaluating the information available, and understanding how people work? This is exactly what a humanist is trained to do. And you can educate yourself and learn the things you find more unfamiliar while you work. Anyone can learn to read a profit and loss account, and risk analyses shouldn’t be insurmountable either. It comes in handy to have a sense of history and perspective.

I realised that corporate management is too homogenous when, a few years back, I took an aptitude test at a test day arranged by a large recruiting company. Each time I returned my answers to the questions that were designed to test the candidate's verbal skills, the liaison asked me, sympathetically, “Was it really hard?” I was also reminded that I had to answer the questions using full sentences and that I should write at least half a page for the essay task – which, of course, prompted me to ask sarcastically what the maximum length was.

However, when I returned the questions that dealt with mathematics or economics, no one even mentioned the word “difficult”. They assumed that these questions would be easy-peasy for a would-be manager. Apparently, mostly engineers and economists are tested for managerial positions, and they may well find writing an essay more difficult. A humanist, on the other hand, already has plenty of experience in writing long texts from their university days.