compose music
reflections on music and creativityYou’ve Got Music Skills but what about a Career, Job and Money?
Let’s face it – most people don’t study music so they can have a stable job. They do it because they love it, they want to be better at it, and they would like to make music eight hours a day!
So when the university joy ride is over and years of financial hardship have taken their toll, many of us have to face the hard reality of re-packaging their skills and competing in the marketplace for a so-called “real” job outside of music!
Reflecting on his career post university, PhD philosophy graduate-turned-management consultant Matt Stewart made the following observations. He said philosophy helped in his first job as a management consultant because it taught him to honestly face the limits of what he didn’t know. This might seem obtuse or appropriately philosophical. He went on to explain that what philosophy taught him was to start from ground zero or the ground up. In context of management consulting, this meant listening without preconceptions and building up a picture from different people’s perspectives on a business problem without jumping to conclusions or forming a picture of the problem prematurely. Apparently this is a key skill for management consultants.
As a PhD music graduate-turned-online marketer, this got me thinking about what skills help me in my current job. A couple come to mind. During my degree, I played around with lots of different music software – cubase, finale, logic, protools and so on. These days I’m often doing tasks in new and unfamilar web applications and software. I’ve noticed that I’m surprisingly quick at this for someone with no formal IT training. I think it’s because in my days of playing around with new music notation software programs I learnt to look for general principles and commands to action standard tasks (such as add new staves or add notes) rather than getting bogged down too early in the full range of new features.
Writing my musicology thesis also helped me develop some unexpected skills. One the challenges I faced in my thesis was how to categorise a musical work that straddled genres or could be defined using several genre labels – none of which really sumed up what the work was. This really gave my mind a workout at the time – it felt like aerobics workout for the brain! But it definitely prepared me for setting up a website profile in a complex program like google analytics where you can view the same or similar data in several different ways depending upon how you slice and dice it!
What skills from your music studies have helped you (or could help you) build a career outside music?
