What Employers Like About Interdisciplinarians

      Abilities to understand and critically evaluate the work of experts and to make decisions based on that evaluation

Problems frequently encountered in today's workplace tend to have solutions from more than one discipline.  Therefore, as an efficient employee, you need to be more than a drone completing repetitive tasks - you need to be a problem-solver who can understand multiple perspectives, weighing and integrating them objectively.

Lacking an ability to do or develop the following qualities, you, as an employee, cannot be anything more to a company than a pawn with an expiration date.  In order to be competitive (and perhaps one day successfully run the family farm) these abilities are absolutely necessary.

      Ability to identify and solve problems

      Ability to evaluate alternatives

      Ability to decide on a course of action

In order to properly evaluate alternatives, you must be able to understand their significance.  When working with problems that can be solved with many different approaches, or with groups whose members come from a variety of fields, it is important to understand the origin and consequence of each solution in order to properly weigh it against the others.

By their nature, those who engage in interdisciplinary studies develop more confidence in their solutions as opposed to those who are educated in merely one approach.  Interdisciplinarians have the ability to identify and evaluate multiple rationalities and can objectify the most coherent course of action to all fields involved.

      Specialized backgrounds that are interdisciplinary

It is also important that as an interdisciplinary employee you have a thorough understanding of the specialties involved in the solution approach as well as developed communication skills.  You may very well find yourself working in groups with specialists from many disciplines.  In order to facilitate integration and mediate between them, you must be able to understand and speak the language of the respective disciplines as well as sometimes translate.  After all, what good is a good idea if it can't be shared or understood?

      Ability of students to think conceptually

      Training in synthetic thinking, in weighing arguments from diverse narrow disciplinary perspectives, and in placing them in the larger context

The ability to understand underlying issues (to detect recurring patterns and make an accurate assessment of connections between subtle or seemingly uncorrelated events) allows you to bring something to the table more than a band-aid.  Temporarily alleviating symptoms feels nice for awhile, but diagnosing the basal and concealed illness is always preferred - it cures the symptoms, prevents their recurrence, and conserves energy and resources.

In addition to deeply understanding the individual mechanisms in a system, having a grasp of how the machine works as a whole provides insight that maintains balance among the individual parts - something especially useful to growing businesses.

      Effective written communication skills

      Effective oral communication

Correspondence is probably the most common facet of communication in business, especially today when email is so pervasive in the workplace as a form of task delegation and idea sharing.  It is unfortunate but true that those who cannot express their ideas comprehensibly and effectively in writing will either not be taken seriously or simply misunderstood -  no matter how good the idea expressed truly is.  The importance lies in this:  when conveying your ideas in writing, anything that stands out as grammatically or clerically wrong takes the focus off of the idea you are presenting, drawing it to your errors and implying a lack of education.  This is a sincere disadvantage to the writer as well as the company that hires him.

An accurate example of the necessity of competent writing ability can be seen in online forums.  There is a prevalent prejudice against anyone using 1337 speak or txt type.  Those who chose to communicate in these ways are often dubbed ignorant and/or lazy.  Anyone with gross misspelling, horrible punctuation practices or a general inability to form a structured and coherent sentence are generally considered uneducated.  Either way, the point of the posts is lost on the audience who is typically unwilling to put the effort into sifting through the nonsense to sort out the meaning.

While written communication skills are imperative, most ideas are effectually conveyed face to face.  You must be articulate in order to persuade people.  When it comes down to it, you are not selling your idea, you're selling yourself.  If you come across as insincere or unintelligible, people will usually not give you the time.  Customers want to buy from people they trust or look up to.  It is in your advantage (as well as anyone who hires you) to not distract your point with idiosyncrasies.  It is even more beneficial to converse in a respected way, avoiding being overly wordy or gaudy with your language so as not to appear conceited or demeaning.  Fair or not, your communication skills are a direct representation of you and your company.

To communicate effectively, whether through writing or speaking, you must be able to keep your audience's attention.  We have all sat through that power-point presentation or that class with the monotone professor where at the end we were just proud of ourselves for staying awake.  We have all had to force ourselves to read that dry characterless book, finding in necessary to re-read paragraphs and pages because our minds wander to things more interesting.  How much of that did you really understand?  If your point is lost on your audience, you're just wasting words.

      Ethical sensitivity

      Ability to understand other value systems

      Effective group participation (team work)

It is ignorant to go through life believing that everyone has the same value set as you do, and coldly callous to be knowledgably indifferent.  There are as many value sets as there are people, and compassion for this when problem-solving in groups is imperative to the leadership quality of properly motivating others. 

Understanding your own set of values is just as important.  Integrity is based on reliably doing what is in line with your own value set - your ethics.  If you can't get behind something with your heart, how can you expect anyone to stand with you?  Conviction drives.  Know what you believe in and what you are willing to stand up for.

You must be a leader as well as a follower.  You cannot be timid with your ideas, yet you must have the ability to discern when others are better.  You must be just as willing to support the idea of another as you are to lead with your own, so long as your heart is in the best interest of the company. 

      Ability to change one's opinion in the light of facts

      Constructive response to criticism

Employees well versed in many fields are more open to different as well as differing approaches and facts.  In order to be a true interdisciplinarian (this is also true to work effectively in a group), your goal must be the greatest benefit of all.  You must put efficiency and the result for the greater good above your own beliefs, even if that means rewriting your previous mindset in light of new compelling evidence.

We are all human.  No matter what confidence you possess, always be open to growth.  Ability to identify help and realign your attitudes, actions and beliefs when given constructive criticism shows your willingness to grow in the direction those who proceed you deem beneficial to the future of their investment.  It instills confidence that what you will become will be better than what you are as well as what they will ever be. 

I work with a diverse group of people assigned to unique projects on a daily basis.  Being an effective team member and fulfilling my job requirements takes all of these skills.  Frequently I must understand and balance the demands of electrical, mechanical, aeronautical, and radio frequency engineers while working in the confines of limited resources and boundaries set by management, and effectively translating my needs for a project to machinists and technicians.

Even though I'm a junior member of the team, my input is valuable because I can understand multiple perspectives due to my broad education in diverse fields.  It is a daily process of asking questions, listening, processing with conceptual thinking, deriving solutions, explaining those solutions, and working with a large group as a part of a larger machine.  I must do this while maintaining awareness of individual sensitivities, motivators, limitations and value sets of my team members as well as keep flexible and open to criticism and new ways of thinking.