My wife and I attended tailgate reunion (the best kind of reunion, in my opinion) with her university degree graduating class before the Michigan State/Air Force football game. Collegiate reunions are rare, but she graduated with a very specialized 5-year degree in Landscape Architecture with just 20 other students. The group studied abroad together and were in all of the same classes and labs for 5 years of their lives, so they were very close.
As everyone was catching up on what they’ve been up to, one very interesting thing became apparent. Despite having a very specialized degree that everyone was extremely dedicated and passionate about from the top program in the country for their field, surprisingly very few in the group were still landscape architects just 11 years after graduating. It was the running joke of the tailgate. Of the folks I talked to, current occupations were:
- a greenroof installer
- a roofing salesperson
- a lighting salesperson
- a full-time housewife
- a CFO of an arboretum
- a paramedic EMT
- a nurse
and then there is my wife, who also made the career switch to nursing from landscape architecture a few years ago. How many trained landscape architects did I speak with that were still doing landscape architecture in just a little over a decade after taking out plenty of student loan debt (ironically, we and many of them are still paying off) for a very specialized 5-year university degree? Just 1! And this is from a program that boasted a 100% job placement rate.
This real-life longitudinal career case study is surely a small sample size, but it perfectly summarizes a lot of educational and career observations that I’ve come to realize over the years:
Very few people REALLY know what they want to do in high school/college and then end up doing it for the rest of their lives.- Job loyalty is dead on both sides. For ages 23-27, 75% of workers have been with their employer for less than 2 years, and 88% less than 5 years. For ages 28-32, 68% of workers were with their employer for less than 2 years, and 84% less than 5 years.
- People get bored.
- Passions change.
- People change.
- Life priorities change (i.e. how much you value work/life balance, compensation, time off, etc.).
- Job markets change.
- Parents, kids, significant others, and associated geographical pulls will often have more career impact than what you graduate with. People not only go to where the jobs are at, but they also geographically gravitate towards family and their significant others career.
As a result:
- Your first job will definitely not be your last.
- Your first career will more than likely not be your last.
There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s life – better to accept it than fight it. Or, why not embrace it and become a serial job changer like my personal finance blogging friend J. Money, who has worked over 40 different jobs in his life and is only in his 30’s?!
What actionable and practical education and career advice can be taken away from all of this?
- Young adults should be advised to chill out. For starters, I really wish that these realities had been taught to me back when I was in school so I would have been so less stressed out about selecting a major that would (I assumed at the time) lock me into one career path for the rest of my freaking life! No pressure in that, is there?
- Avoid highly specialized degrees at the start of your career. I think it’s probably best to avoid highly specialized degrees altogether at the start of your career. If you become really passionate about something after having close exposure to it and you want to eventually move into a specialized career after already being in the job market for a while, it might make sense to go and get a specialized degree. But to commit to a specialized field at the age of 18 when you know nothing about a field or even yourself and be locked into it (or a low paying job elsewhere) until you can go back to school? It’s a waste of money. There is nothing wrong with going for broader degrees (i.e. business, engineering/computer science, medical, accounting/math) that have a ton of job prospects to get you started and then get specific later on.
- Default to cost efficiency. With your first degree often not leading to a lifelong career field and not being recommended, why not go the inexpensive route? There is no shame, only wisdom in this. To change her career, my wife got the cheapest degree needed (a 16-month accelerated associate’s degree from a community college) to get into nursing, but it pays the exact same as someone who got the degree from an expensive four-year university program.
- And finally, try to find an employer that will help you foot the bill for continuing your education. Now that my wife has a nursing job, her employer is paying 75% of the cost for her to finish her bachelor’s degree and beyond. My employer offers tuition reimbursement as well. It’s out there, if you look for it. Don’t pay for it out of pocket unless you’re 100% sure of the field you want to move into.
It would be very interesting to hear personal stories. Are you working in the same field you originally graduated in? Why or why not? And what have you learned in the school of hard knocks?
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Good article. But, I feel there’s a good middle ground between getting a very specific degree in a limited field and a more generalized and less practical degree. Most undergrad degrees don’t specifically correlate to one field. Even the ones that do on the surface, like engineering or accounting, are broader than people realize – a lot of people with those degrees don’t work in those fields.
However, numerous studies show that people with degrees in STEM fields, and perhaps you can lump finance and economics in there as well, make more money and have better employment prospects than those with liberal arts degrees. So while there’s certainly something to be said about majoring in something you find interesting, you also shouldn’t discount the financial impact of what you major in either…
Yeah, I think that was exactly my point with, “There is nothing wrong with going for broader degrees (i.e. business, engineering/computer science, medical, accounting/math) that have a ton of job prospects to get you started and then get specific later on.”
These are your middle ground. They are also where most jobs are being added.
As an actuary, lumping together accounting and math makes me a sad panda. Counting is not math. :p
We tell young actuarial-hopefuls to major in something like math, econ, finance and not actuarial science.
I’ve been playing around with the idea of getting into that but I have a BS in Electrical Engineering. Would that work for setting me up to study as an actuary? Thanks.
I would like to express a hearty, “Go Blue” in light of events later this week. I hope your Spartans have their big boy pants on; should be a fun one!
Oh boy, not going to take the bait there. But yeah, I’m expecting a good game. I’m fired up.
I have been fortunate to be in the same career field for 12 years, it seems if you jump jobs frequently and switch careers how would you ever climb the ladder so to speak? But excellent article and to be honest after 12 years I am still not 100% sure what I want to do and how long I want to do it.
Yeah, that’s an interesting discussion topic there – jumping jobs (employers) is the quickest way to go up the career ladder, from everything I have seen. However, jumping careers altogether is the quickest way to start over from scratch.
You can’t expect 18 year olds to be able to pick what they want to do for the rest of their lives… especially if all they’ve done up until then was go to school! It’s doubly bad when you’re picking a specialized career, we’re pretty bad at the idea of sunk costs. :)
Great article. I am going through this myself now. I lost the passion for engineering earlier this year and seems like a lot of people from my graduating class are also looking for career changes.
The problem at many of our jobs is that there is no engagement from the top or interesting challenges. We grew so much as a company in the last 5-10 years that there is so much bureaucracy and so many levels of management that I spend most of my days chasing project managers to discuss budgets, legal matters and staffing than doing actual engineering work. I probably do less than 2-3 hours of technical work per week now…same goes for many of my colleagues and graduating friends.
Great article. I am in the medical field and you would be surprised how many graduates (from medical school) actually change their field of study during or after residency. One study I stumbled upon is up to 30% of the graduating medical school class will be practicing something different than they originally picked for their residency. I stayed in my field but have met many colleagues who were practicing Obstetricians, Pediatricians or Hospitalists before they jumped into Anesthesiology.
Yeah, that’s a good point. With the medical field, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to start in more of an entry level role before committing to specialized fields that take a decade of schooling/residency – RN or LPN, for example. You’ll have many of the same undergrad classes and it allows you to get real life experience in the medical field before committing huge amounts of time/costs.
I put in a career (25 years) with my undergrad and grad degree. I was a youth pastor. I think one thing that helped us financially was to stay put at one job (20 years at my last church). You bleed money when you move and it takes some time to get your budget in line after career change. My salary was humble but in my mid 40’s my house is a year out from being paid off, we have no debt, take vacations, and have a pretty decent nest egg saved up. I just transitioned careers, the house is now a rental and I plan to purchase another rental property when my first house is paid off.
Careers are no different to personal finances. Set a goal, make a plan to get to it and focus on executing to that plan. Adapt along the way, expect the unexpected and invest the time to think through both where the skills you already possess are going, and who else, outside where you currently have a career, could benefit from your skills.
A few tips:
Paths that don’t depend on someone else often offer the most flexibility. For instance, if you are a software programmer, how dependent are you on your code…there are logic and problem solving skills that you would be developing that have just as much application in project management with people, not bytes.
If you’re an educator you may feel you are dependent on your students, in many respects you are, but you’re not dependent on having them in a room and commuting to work.
As a career matures think what is coming next, mentorship to others, easing back, transitioning to something gentler…what ever it is, make sure those are skills that will be needed in the future and pick your audience now so you can learn about their needs.
This clearly strikes home for me.
Studied to become a teacher (9 years: high-school + college).
Worked for 10 years as a radio DJ (got hired when graduating from high-school and never worked as a teacher, actually).
Started doing web design (had a small site, then more, then clients) on the side.
After 10 years in the radio business, when I lost my well paying job, I just moved to freelancing full time.
Don’t know what’s in store for me, I’m open though to anything life will bring me.
Very interesting! My husband and I both have college degrees – I am a lawyer, but now design and own a nursery linen brand. My hubby was a land surveyor by degree, but now works in construction management :-)