By Peter Vogt
11 March 2004

Summary

• No major will guarantee an immediate job after graduation.
• A combination of factors will dictate your success or struggle.

It’s dangerous to make blanket generalizations about different jobs, careers and industries. You’ve probably heard many pronouncements like these from friends, family members and others:

• "You should major in computer science. It’s the hottest field, and you’ll get a good job when you graduate."

• "You’re going to major in art? You’re nuts! You’ll never find a job!"
• "Why don’t you try accounting? There are tons of jobs in that field."
• "An English major, huh? I hope you enjoy the unemployment line."

Sound familiar? There’s no way to say with certainty that you’ll get an instant job if you go into nursing or that you’ll never find a job if you major in music or sociology. Why? Because there are simply too many variables affecting your eventual job search in any field, and you need to take those variables into account, both when you’re deciding on a career path and when you’re actually taking the first step toward your first job after graduation.

Here are a few key factors affecting job search success:

The Current Job Market and Economy

If you’re looking for your first real job, you’ve probably already seen the huge impact of this particular factor. Generally speaking, the job market for new college graduates is dicey at best. Fewer jobs are available, and more people are competing for them. That’s a reversal since last year and previous years when new grads had many more opportunities and fewer people to beat out.

The economy and the job market will always play a key role in how much you have to work to get the job you want.

Your Experience

If you’ve gained experience in school through internships, co-ops, part-time jobs and/or volunteering, you’ll almost always have an edge over your peers who have not picked up experience in college. Two and three years ago, many students with information technology-related degrees — but little or no experience — learned the degree that was supposed to lead to an immediate job wasn’t worth much to employers without hands-on experience.

Geography

Where you look for a job matters. Suppose you’d like to do something in the film industry, but you don’t want to leave the city in which you went to school — Minot, North Dakota. There are probably a few film-related jobs in Minot, but there are many more in places like Los Angeles/Hollywood and New York. So if you look for a film job in Minot and you don’t find one, you can’t accurately conclude "there are no jobs in the film industry." All you can really say is, "There aren’t many film-industry jobs in Minot, North Dakota."

Your Education and Skills

If you’d like to become a financial planner someday, but can’t or won’t pursue a college degree in finance or financial planning, you’ll find it tough to compete with people who can and will get that educational preparation. It’s not that you’ll have no chance of getting a financial planning job, but you’ll be at a significant disadvantage.

On the flip side, if you’re an English major and you’ve taken the initiative to learn how to build and maintain complex Web sites, you’ll have a considerable edge over English majors who don’t have that knowledge. And often you’ll even be able to compete with people who have computer-related majors, because you have both technical skills and writing abilities.

So as you mull over what field to major in or what career to pursue, keep these key factors in the forefront of your mind. Don’t fall into the trap of believing your career decisions are as cut-and-dry as most people think they are. That’s just not the case.

Like most everything else in life, your career decisions and your eventual job hunt will involve a lot of "it depends." The more you can understand and even control those "it depends" factors, the more likely you’ll choose and eventually land the job that fits you best, no matter what the degree of difficulty involved.