I am under the impression that millions find jobs that have nothing to do with their degree and that still offer some job satisfaction, security and potential for a better life. There are tons of people who studied history, poly science, english, etc. and many of them ended up doing ok. I am also under the impression that their 4 year degrees actually offered them something in the job market, even if the field they ended up working in had nothing to do with what they studied (largely due to the transferable skills you gain in college).
So what do they do? Do you end up in white collar jobs? Is that the main direction people with degrees who cannot find work in their field end up doing because the skills they gained in college (typing, meeting deadlines, working in groups, etc) come in handy for white collar work?
There has to be an area between finding a job in your field vs. working in low wage, part time, no room for advancement service sector work.
That is what I am tripped up on. I feel my only two options are work in my field of study (which I like, but the jobs really aren’t there right now. However right now I am luckily working part time in my field. But a full time job with a future or benefits is elusive) or low wage service sector work where I never needed a degree to begin with.
So how do you find job fields that offer decent standards of living where a BA or BS matters or makes a difference, even if it isn’t directly related to the job at hand?
I can’t really say for others, but for me it was a little thing called “working your way up.” Most companies hire current employees preferentially to outside people. I started as a customer service rep; 8 years later I was a marketing copywriter covering genre fiction across 2 large national bookstore chains. My supervisor also worked with me in customer service; previously she had been a manager at oneof the chain’s retail stores (among other places, in Anchorage Alaska!)
There were a lot of steps along that path - but the most important thing I did was identify WHO I wanted to work for within the company, rather than WHAT I wanted to do. That’s because IMHO there are no bad jobs; only bad bosses. Our whole team traveled with my first boss as he rose and became ultmately, VP of marketing.
I wasn’t dead set on a field or even one specific type of work. For example I would have liked to try being a buyer, but that opportunity just didn’t come along. Oh well.
I have a BA in Anthropology.
Now I also have a JD & I’m an attorney - went back to school at 30.
I’d been interested in another field prior to starting college, so I spent all my high school years gaining experience in that field. I took part in everything my school offered that I thought would look good on a future application or resume.
So naturally, my first semester in, I fell in love with something else and majored in that instead. I didn’t go go grad school for it, though, and that greatly limits what you can do in that field.
I wound up using the experience I’d accumulated in my first interest to apply for an entry-level/degree required position at my current employer. I found out about the place from my friend/roommate, who heard about it from his friend, who also worked there. From that entry-level position, I’ve since changed departments, and thanks to a few technologies and trends, my job has expanded and evolved. I do nothing related to either my first area of interest or my major, and am only peripherally involved with what I was first hired to do here.
I still think I did the right thing changing majors, I still love the field I did major in, I don’t regret not having gone to grad school, and I’m fairly stable and mostly content where I am, so I’m happy with the way it worked out.
I’ve definitely seen people do it. They almost always fall into the following groups.
Take extremely low paying and extremely entry level job and work their way up (Staff Ass in DC, more or less admin in “sexy” professions like advertising etc.)
Go to a really prestigious undergrad, get good grades (not all that hard unless you’re some place like MIT or CalTech or majoring in Math) and take a certain number of quantitative courses even if they pursue a non-quant major. (my friends who were Wall Street analysts do have degrees in things like English and history)
Network ass off (alumni, parents’ friends, lawn furniture) to get entry level job and move up from there.
I also think there’s some luck involved in being in the right place at the right time.
Ok. I doubt I could get a job in your firm because I suspect it has to do with money matters which I know nothing about.
But how does this work in general? I’ve never seen an ad for anything that didn’t require specific skills or 5 years experience in that particular line of work. I’ve never seen an ad looking for “intelligent, educated people needed, degree in anything OK, will train on the job”.
I’m dealing with the situation now. I have a BArch degree and have worked as an architect for over 20 years. Over the years I gained experience in so many areas that I thought it would be easy to transfer my skills to another career but I’m not finding that at all. Maybe it’s because there are so many applicants in the job pool, maybe it’s because I’m over 50, but I’m afraid.
I want to add that in this situation, what I’m doing is networking like hell and constantly writing new ‘functional resumes’ to address specific job openings. In some cases, you need to take the ‘requirements’ part of a job listing with a grain of salt. Afterall, they can ask for whatever they want - but you may be able to fill their needs even better than the person who has ‘xyz’.
Funny, I have seen them in Spain, France, the UK and the US. It often comes under names such as “the recent graduates program”. The catch is that they really want people who are barely old enough to shave.
I had an “office gopher” sort of job in college. That turned into a job out of college. That I quit and temped for a while. That turned into a job offer, that got me promotions, that I quit and consulted, which got me a job offer, which got me promotions.
But I’ve never gotten a job from an ad or off Monster. I’ve gotten jobs by falling into them.
Well, if it was that easy to get into Harvard or MIT and get good grades, everyone would do it. But otherwise, yes.
There’s usually a shitload of “intelligent, educated people needed, degree in anything OK, will train” jobs on Monster and Careerbuilder. They are usually “churn and burn” jobs for commission sales, “financial advisors” (AKA cold-calling stockbrokers) and multi-tier marketing programs (AKA pyramid schemes).
Different broker firms have different levels of scrutiny, but many of the “Boiler Room” style firms don’t really care about your background, other than maybe having a degree. I went on one of those interviews years ago and it was basically like the film. All they really care about is if you can answer a phone and pass the Series 7. They pay you almost nothing until you pass the exam, and then you basically go out and make money on commissions. If you don’t make your quotas. they just fire you.
**Zago **- It’s very difficult to change into a completely new career once you have been doing it for 20 years. It’s usually better to try and transition it into something related.
The way you find jobs outside your field of study is the same way you find jobs in your field of study. You try to network with people.
The old adage of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” tends to hold true in these cases. However, I would add a caveat: it’s not what you know, it’s what other people think you can do. In the examples above, people worked their way up in a particular company. I really doubt that any of them had degrees in business management. However, they got promoted because enough people thought that they could be good managers.
Major national and international corporations have graduate recruitment programmes. They spend a bunch of money and time targeting undergraduates to try and attract the best, regardless of degree. Most colleges in the UK, for example, have this thing called the ‘milkround’, when employers have a stand at a recruitment fair at colleges up and down the country.
Many of these employers are more interested in your personal skilset/personality/intelligence than your degree subject. For an example, check out Ernst & Young, who specifically state they do NOT recruit on degree subject: http://www.ey.com/eyinsight/index.html
I didn’t say it was easy. I said that the people I know who switch fields fall into one of 3 categories. And getting good grades at Harvard really isn’t all that hard, they used to be notorious for GPA padding-at MIT it’s still pretty difficult. Switching fields is a difficult endeavour to begin with, it’s not like there’s some easy route you can take to do it.
There’s a meme on the Straight Dope that it’s better to be a plumber than to get an English degree (even from a prestigious college) because liberal arts degrees don’t qualify you for anything corporate. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s at the point where any educational opportunity is deemed to be “not worth it”.
Personally, I think it depends on what you’re combining your fluff degree with and if you’re lucky enough to graduate in a good economy. If you have enough math on your transcript and you’re at a target school, it’s not that hard to get a reasonable job after college even if your major was in something like Philosophy. I feel really bad for the kids graduating from college now because they just had the bad luck to graduate near the bottom of a trough but would have been okay if they’d been a little older. It’s exactly what happened to me (mediocre undergrad student, pre dot com bust graduate) and my sister (outstanding undergrad student, post dot com bust graduate).
My personal feeling is that it’s harder to switch industries when you’re a bit more advanced in your career because nearly every industry seems to enjoy pigeonholing people and they either mass hire really junior people (creating an incoming “class”) or selectively hire extremely experienced people and it’s hard to sell them on “I’m in the middle, can I be junior again?”
Having been a management consultant most of my career, I can tell you it makes it a lot easier to transition to different corporate careers. But the problem is that they are all different flavors of what I call “Financiaccountechnolawperations”. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you are doing project finance, implementing SAP systems, forensic accounting, risk management, SOX advisory, actual accounting or corporate law, it’s all various flavors of sitting in a cube with a laptop grinding through data and rules to support business decisions (in Powerpoint decks). Doesn’t even matter what industry it is.
It isn’t like a real career change into something totally different like architecture, nursing, or running a restaurant.
Sure. Case in point, I graduated business school into one of the Big-4 (rhymes with Toilet & Douche) with a class of 20 in my local NYC office and probably 200 in the “National Practice Area”. I had a background in Civil Engineering, a few years of IT consulting experience and an MBA which made me eminantly qualified for their “Performance Improvement” practice (they all have stupid names with words like “Advisory” or “Risk” or “Delivery” in their names. Did that for a few years, then moved to a smaller firm’s “Litigation and Forensics” practice. Tried “Software License Management” for a bit. Now I’m looking for my next former employer. Maybe something with “Strategy” or “Knowledge” in the title.
Basically it’s all just SQL queries, Viso process flows and Powerpoint decks stating very obvious things in the most pompous way possible.
Well obviously, but those type of careers require professional training. Many corporate positions will take any degree and train you on the job.
Example: my best friend studied product design, but at the end of her degree decided she didn’t want to be a product designer. So she applied for the graduate trainee programme for British Telecom (UK equivalent of AT&T). As is standard on these type of programmes, she spent about two years on secondment to a bunch of different departments, eventually settling in marketing. She’s now a group account director for an advertising agency.
I don’t think this is still an option, but in my senior year of college I took the Federal Service Entrance Exam (which was shortly thereafter replaced by the PACE) which put me on a notification list for federal jobs nationwide. While some of those jobs required specific skills, many of them only required a college degree and/or a minimum FSEE score. My degree in Theater qualified me for the job I eventually got working for Social Security, where I stayed for thirty years.
I have a BA in anthropology. I worked in the financial industry for about five years after college. It wasn’t intentional - I needed a job and applied to everything I was remotely qualified for. I ended up being hired as an administrative assistant at a mortgage brokerage, and learned enough to keep getting jobs in the field. I didn’t have much work experience when I started, and no one’s really out there looking for people with degrees in anthropology.
This would have been awesome except that I hated it and felt trapped because it was the only thing I really knew about. Eventually I quit and went back to school to do a masters degree because it seemed like the only way to do something I actually wanted to do.
Correlation between field of study and career is vastly overrated, IMHO (except for professional degrees like MD, JD, etc., which are truly prerequisites for the job).
I’d also like to point out that for many careers, it’s not strictly necessary to have a job in the field to gain experience. Use your free time to become proficient in the skills you need for the job you want. That may mean taking classes at night, it may mean doing personal projects or volunteering somewhere. Yes, it will still be hard to get past the resume screen stage if you don’t have previous professional experience. But it’s not impossible, and once you’re past that first stage, having concrete skills will help a lot (and possibly let you avoid starting at the absolute bottom rung).
More importantly, this kind of preparation helps immensely with networking, which is almost always the best way to find a job. Classes, side projects and volunteer work can help you meet people in the field while simultaneously showing them that you know what you’re doing. Additionally, if you meet someone in the field in any context (even if it’s standing in line at the grocery store), it’s going to be much easier for them to help you if you actually have some relevant skills. Many people are happy to help friends get jobs at their company, but if you don’t have the necessary skills, there’s not much they can do.
Obviously this all has to be adjusted for the specific field you’re considering.
Or more often than not, they will give you zero training beyond a few days of “Here’s Why It’s Awesome to Work Here!” presentations.
The training program you describe sounds similar to the management training program at GE I applied to after college. Basically, these are highly competetive programs where they take top students and rotate them through different business units or departments over several years.
It sort of seems like the higher up the ladder you go, the less you actually need to know about how stuff gets done. Companies seem to think that for certain positions, it’s better to hire “smart” people with good grades from top schools and big name companies on their resume, regardless of the actual work performed or subjects studied.
which I know nothing about.