During a recent work trip to Washington, DC, I found myself admiring the beauty of the US Capitol Building: the paintings on the ceiling, the frieze around the dome and more. It is an impressive intersection of engineering, history and art.

I wondered aloud if – with all of the cuts to arts education – future generations would have the context to fully appreciate and understand such a monument.

A gentleman on my tour replied curtly, “Arts no longer matter. There are more critical things to teach in schools.”

Unfortunately, this assumption is all too common. People believe that our businesses and economy can thrive solely on engineering and hard sciences.

As a recruiter for Microsoft, I must disagree – strongly. For starters, the arts teach creative problem-solving, teamwork and the ability to view things from different perspectives. These are key skills for success in a diverse workplace like Microsoft.

Moreover, Microsoft is so much more than just a technology company with engineering jobs.

We hire a lot of artistic people who use technology to perform creative jobs. If you think about games like Halo, or products like Zune, Bing, Kinect and MSN, it becomes obvious that we need artistic and creative people. Otherwise, we'd still be looking at a black screen and a flashing green cursor like in the MS-DOS days. I, for one, do not want to go back to the pre-GUI world. 

A quick look at the Microsoft Careers website shows over 100 jobs for people with a creative skill set. Xbox and Game Studios need people with backgrounds in gaming, film and theater. We hire matte painters, lighting artists, concept artists, FX artists… to name just a few. We have tech writing, content writing and user experience jobs that need people with strong verbal and visual arts skills. We need producers who know how to take a game from storyboard to launch. These job requirements are more likely to seek a degree in art, animation, communications, English, journalism, theater or graphic arts than they are to ask for a computer science or engineering degree.

Another way to phrase my initial question would be: without arts in the schools, how will the future game designers and UX people discover their artistic strengths and decide to pursue a creative career so they can someday work for Microsoft?

If you are an artistic/creative person looking for a job at Microsoft, you can visit the Careers page and do the same search I did. Use the terms "artist OR creative" and you can review the jobs. Or use the Job Category and chose "Software Engineering: Creative" or "Software Engineering: Content Publishing".