UpCity published a fantastic piece about evaluating skills and strengths when hiring an SEO. I would add <immodestly> as someone that’s successful in SEO: the divergence from one to the next person in skills or aptitude is so wide as to make the idea of STEM as a good fit too much of a “straight jacket.” My education, back in the day, was BS in Psych and MS in Mass Communications. I’m not amazing at coding, something perhaps important to the newbie SEO, but not to someone with over 10 years working in the space. I was great at philosophy, not so much in stats: Great at accounting when it had to do with “pattern recognition” vs. pure logic of following rules. I do big data science projects which you’d think are all logic. They are not. So, the lesson here is you can come at this as someone that knows to manage the purely “logical” STEM type people on your team if your ability to look at 1000s of conceptual ideas is strong.
With semantic SEO and content strategy that involves logical evaluation of full topic coverage, I’d argue the same principles apply.
I spend a lot of time looking at LSI and web search engines. I don’t actually have to understand the highly complex machine learning Google uses to find relationships with entities. Instead, my focus is again on software, developing creative techniques to backwards engineer Google Hummingbird and RankBrain, and my own creative, strategic “connecting the dots.” I don’t connect the dots from logical, STEM learning logic. I connect them from decades of business experience and improving skills in high level conceptualization.