University courses come in thousands of different shapes and sizes. In some cases, the outcome of studying a course is clear: it will equip you with the specialised knowledge and skills required to perform a particular job.

This applies not just to the more modern range of explicitly vocational degree courses, such as tourism management or product design, nor old favourites such as nursing or architecture, but also subjects that are directly relevant–and often necessary–for a particular career path. In this category we’d put many of the most popular university courses that students study today, such as chemistry, biomedical sciences or psychology.

It’s fair to say that a large proportion of the people that do all these courses study them because they are interested in following a career related to that subject area. They might have to go onto some further type of training after university, but a pre-requisite for that is the course that they have chosen to study.

In many ways, people who are drawn to these courses are lucky. In an age of economic uncertainty, their career path is being cleared and paved right in front of them, and all they need to do is walk down it without falling over (metaphor hint: this means not failing their exams).

But what happens if your talents and interests lie in subjects that have no obvious link to the real world? Studying philosophy is all well and good, but go down to the swankiest restaurant where you live and it’s more than likely it’ll be the accountants, lawyers and engineers dining out there; if you see any professional philosophers there at all it’ll probably be out by the bins, scavenging for scraps.

So, to ask a very blunt question, what’s the point of studying courses like philosophy if they don’t clearly prepare you for any particular career? Some people–and especially those who are proud to call the University of Life their alma mater–would say that there is none. People who do vocational degrees might be tempted to say the same.

However, if your heart has been captured by one of these subjects but you are unsure it’ll be worth your while studying it at university, think again. For while the subject matter of these courses might not cover things that people need to know about in their jobs, they offer a wealth of skills that employers crave.

Top among these are critical thinking and written communication. If you can get to grips with the finer points of the causes of the Cold War or the subtexts of twentieth-century German playwrights with only a gentle amount of input from the experts and then turn your research into the subject into a lean, concise and insightful essay, then you have developed a skill that is in demand for many, many walks of life. It’s not the subject matter itself that’s important, but rather the fact that mastering it was difficult and prompted you to look at things in an original way, appraise vast amounts of information and put it into highly readable English. Those skills used to dissect Stalinism or Brecht are exactly the same as the ones required to deliver a report into emerging markets in Latin America or anti-poverty initiatives.

Engaging in productive discussions in which you put across your opinions and try to reconcile them with those of others is also a skill that the non-vocational skill courses excel in teaching. Anyone who completes a philosophy degree should by the end be able to not just talk confidently and lucidly about even the most complex of subjects, but also take on board the nuances of other people’s own views. If you’ve ever been in a meeting with someone who doesn’t listen to you, can’t understand your point or is incapable of expressing their own thoughts you’ll realise just how important a skill this is in the real world.

While facts can be crammed and memorised, developing intellectual skills such as these is a much more difficult process that most employers simply don’t have the time or resources to nurture in their new recruits. They’d rather it be that you provide these skills and they’ll bring the knowledge. You’ll even find that many top employers are just as happy to take on graduates from subjects that having nothing to do with what they do as they are people with relevant degree subjects. Accountancy and law are just two very long-standing examples of this.

So if you’re currently trying to work out whether the subject you applied to study at university is really worth the financial commitment because it has no pre-set career outcome, rest assured that it’ll probably open plenty of doors for you.

Plus you’ll be able to recite Shakespeare or know loads of stuff about Vikings. And who doesn’t love Vikings?