Human Capital

I am a UIUC Class of 2017 graduate and former student of Prof. Arvan’s who took his Fall 2016 Economics of Organizations class. I am writing this guest post to indicate to his current students those aspects of this class and the UIUC Economics major as a whole I have found to be useful as “human capital,” or skills and knowledge possessed by a person that are valuable to others. I will also mention a few skills that I wish I had learned from this class or UIUC before beginning my career.

I was initially attracted to Economics as a field during my Freshman year at UIUC, when my first few Econ classes fascinated me by bringing a systematic, organized viewpoint to something as decidedly unsystematic and disorganized as people. My fascination and curiosity on the matter only grew as undergrad went on, and during my last year of college I decided that I would like to help expand those systems and models that fascinated me by performing academic research in Economics. I’m happy to say that I have the privilege of doing some Economic research in my current position. 

For full disclosure, I tell you that I have only been working in the Econ field for a little over one year, and have been working for the same company that entire time – meaning that, in statistical terms, my “sample size” of the Economics career is small. However, during my first year I moved between two positions: the first was a sales position involving planning and delivering public presentations and demos of my company’s product, which is software that generates economic forecasts according to user-specified assumptions and is intended to be used by both Economists and non-Economists. My current position is in research and development for the company, where I test the forecasting software along with helping to gather,process, and analyze the economic data and estimations that our software is to base its forecasts on. This involves some software programming that is primarily done in Microsoft Excel. While my sample size is small, I hope that in light of my two widely varied positions involving making public presentations, data analysis, and software programming, you might still consider my career experience to be something of a “representative sample” of the Economics career and the types of jobs you might take after graduating.

There are three main things that I learned from Prof. Arvan’sclass that proved helpful in my first year in the professional world: elementary Excel programming skills (through homework), thoroughly explaining complex concepts and situations (through blog posts), and explaining complex concepts to people in a “high level,” quick, and easily grasped manner (through the final project.) While other data analysis tools such as Python and R have become popular, Excel remains a powerful, widely used tool for analyzing data in economics as well as other fields. In particular, Prof. Arvan’s class functioned as a good introduction to Excel references and formulas, which I use daily on economic data to find growth rates, reformat data into required units, and bring data from different spreadsheets together. Many Economics graduates find jobs that involve doing the same.

Explaining complex concepts as thoroughly as you can in easy-to-understand terms was an important skill when I was in my sales position. I would often break down sample forecasts and the economic terms and data involved to prospective clients such as high-level business executives who hadn’t personally used economics concepts in over a decade or highway engineers who were attempting to see the economic impacts of their proposed project. In fact, many Econ jobs will involve explaining economic ideas to non-Economists. The related skill of summarizing concepts into quick, high level explanations for an audience has been almost as important, because it gave me some early practice for the “elevator” speeches on my company and its product I would be giving to people when cold calling them to invite them to a seminar or a meeting. This is an important skill in the business world in general. 

Regarding the rest of the Economics major, three things that have been helpful as human capital so far have been the required statistics classes, the student presentations required in some classes, and a familiarization with common Macroeconomic vocabulary. Learning about common statistical tests and their implications has made it easier to understand academic Econ research papers. My company’s academic clients use our software on their projects, so some statistical literacy has made it easier for me to talk to prospective clients about work that has been previously done with the software. Some ideas for our forecasts were taken in part from conclusions drawn in academic studies so statistical literacy has also helped me better understand my company’s product. It’s worth noting that it seems to me that many companies that employ Econ graduates, such as economic modeling companies, think tanks, or NGOs, might want new employees to quickly familiarize themselveswith selected academic literature that involves their product or supports their viewpoint.

Because my sales position involved public presentations with an accompanying PowerPoint, having some practice with that during college was helpful. While this may be rather specific to my company, I have also found that the general familiarity with Macroeconomic vocabulary I gained from the required Macroeconomics course sequence (such as knowing what consumption and investments are) provided a helpful foundation for understanding forecasts from my company’s software. Looking at my own job and the jobs that other Econ graduates have landed, it seems that, while you may not find yourself using most of the complex economic models or theories you learned in college, remembering the basic vocabulary and economic relationships (like that between supply and demand)that it took to understand the complex stuff will be helpful.  

I wish I had learned more Excel skills while at UIUC, since it is, by far, the tool I use most in my current position. A quick lesson on macros, formula auditing, and some of the more complex functions, even just to know those features were there so I would know what to search for when a good use case for them came up, would have been added a lot of value. Macros are helpful for automating highly repetitive tasks, which can come up often when working with large datasets. Formula auditing, which allows the user to trace the formula in a selected cell to its precedents (cells on which the value in the selected cell depends) and dependents (cells that depend on the value of the selected cell) can make checking over large numbers of spreadsheets much easier. 

While I am naturally very nervous when speaking in front of groups, in retrospect I wish the Econ major involved more class presentations – especially presentations that encouraged more spontaneous and improvisational speaking. When I prepared for the few class presentations I had in the Econ major, my typical strategy was to write out a full script, which I would practice and memorize. If allowed, I would have notecards with brief talking points with me during the presentation for reference. This approach would turn out to be impractical for presentations on products as a sales associate, as my coworkers that I would be giving the presentation with would often introduce changes at the last minute that would render parts of my script obsolete. Sometimes my part of a presentation would depend on knowing what a coworker would say during theirs, and they would finish their part of the presentation at close to the last minute. While I knew the product and the general talking points of my presentations well, my psychological dependence on scripts memorized and rehearsed down to the individual word would often make me feel and appear nervous during presentations where even a relatively inconsequential change was made. Shaking this dependence before entering the job world wouldhave saved me trouble later on. For better or for worse, Economics is a field that heavily centers on debate between schools of thought, meaning that many jobs involve standing in front of an audience and attempting to convince them that your way of thinking, as opposed to another, is the one they should follow.

While UIUC may not have prepared me for everything I would face in my first year in the professional world, I look at my two points above as the first major aspects to focus on in my post-college professional development. To build my skills in those areas, I regularly read guides on using Excel and attend Toastmasters, a club with chapters around the nation where members practice public speaking using each other as the audience. This brings me to one more piece of human capital I got from my experience with Prof. Arvan and UIUC – a habit of lifelong learning and honing my skills. Econ, like all other fields nowadays, is advancing fast, so no matter what human capital we gained from undergrad, we will have to continually expand our skills to keep up.