This past Sunday’s NY Times job article talked about how
most college grads do not have the hard skills to be able to join the work
force immediately in any useful manner. Fewer companies can afford or are
willing to pay to train these young kids. A generalized liberal arts curriculum
is no longer a prized calling card.
Great if you’re a freshman, but what do you do if you are in
your senior year and will graduate with a liberal arts degree? The answer depends on what you and your family
can afford to do. My first choice would be to send you off to grad school for
something very specific—finance MBA, computer science, advanced analytics.
Second choice would be an internship if you can find one, paid or not. But you’d
have to be strategic in your choice of internships if you aren’t getting paid.
Running around as a fashion intern might be fun, but will it afford you a job
when you graduate? Your unpaid
internship has to give you skills or it’s not worth it. I’ve talked about
skills that are needed in my field before: web analytics, SEO, paid search,
technical content management, data mining, etc. Many companies need skills
where the demand outweighs the supply. Finance, technology, engineering,
marketing/advertising to name a few.
If you’re thinking I don’t really want to sit behind a desk
and crunch numbers, take it one step beyond that. Where can the number job take
you? In marketing, many managers start off as analysts. They know that they’ll
have to put in the grunt year of running numbers but what’s on the other side
is the place they want to go. And employers love that you started in the
analytic area—they know that you have a solid basis for understanding the
metrics behind a business. I have to imagine it works the same in areas of
finance.
So if you are in college now and deciding on a major—think smartly
and strategically. Look up profiles of people whose jobs you’d like and see
where they started. If you are graduating or recently graduated, find the best
ways to get skills. (and if you’ve made it into a management training program
with your liberal arts degree—congrats to you—but congrats won’t be for
everyone).
