(Disclosure: I'm getting a PhD in CS now) > The hard part of startups is product: knowing what to build, and being able to build it Funny enough, this is why I think a PhD is undervalued by many. You spend years focused on a single area, sometimes pivoting topics, and getting hands on experience with operating solo on the outskirts of a particular field. The overall point of the degree is you learn how to learn. The…
But all of that discovery work, the financial planning, what their actual objectives were, having to dig into why someone wanted to buy a house, etc. proved to be some of the most invaluable and transferable skills I've learned (that, and SQL ;). A lot of that part of the course was learning how to ask questions, and learning how to follow-up to get past the superficial and often incorrect initial answers.
To your point I feel like there's these kind of meta skills that are transferable to many domains, but are sadly lacking these days from a lot of education that is hyper-focused on very role-specific qualifications. The ones that immediately come to mind:
- Learning how to learn (i.e., how to understand yourself, and improve)
- How to ask good questions (similar to above, but about others)
- And something I need a better label for because I just clumsily call it "sales", but in the Daniel Pink "To Sell is Human" style. Something like being able to structure a coherent and compelling narrative to other people. Clearly I fall short on this one.