Thinking About Working: Issue #6
Written by Noah Leavitt, Director of the Career and Community Engagement Center
Helpful new job market research
During the last few chilly weeks, the lounge in the Career and Community Engagement Center (CCEC) has been filled with students discussing options for advancing their academic work and intellectual focus. What classes should (or shouldn’t) I pre-register for? What should I major in? Which professors do I want to take classes from before I graduate? My colleagues and I delight in overhearing these energetic and thoughtful exploration of their options.
Sometimes we also hear students thinking about potential relationships between classes or majors and possible post-Whitman options.
In honor of those conversations, today I want to share two pieces of new research that can add to how students think about these questions. Both findings are highly relevant to the question of how much choices about academic work might relate to their post-graduate plans.
As background, in the past decade the higher education career development field has made enormous advances tracking ways the job market is bringing in new college graduates. This has been especially true since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on the groundbreaking work of Dr. Philip D. Gardner ‘69, longtime director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, higher ed professionals have embraced data-informed opportunities to gain insight about how to help students enter the world of work in ways that will maximize their success.
In the CCEC, one of our go-to resources for timely, relevant and broad insights about what is happening in this “new hire” space is the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) which has an active research program to assist their higher ed partners. Two new findings deserve attention:
First, in a recent LinkedIn post, NACE ED Shawn VanDerziel noted that in their October Job Outlook survey, NACE found that this year “only 37% of employers are planning to use GPA to screen recent college graduates as candidates for positions.” This was a drop from 73% that used GPA just four years ago!
He reflected that this means that “employers are becoming savvier about screening candidates for skills, knowledge and ability, rather than a potentially restrictive/bias qualification,” thus making more positions more accessible to a wider and more diverse applicant pool. Importantly, VanDerziel forecasts that this trend “will provide more equity for first-generation, historically marginalized (including POC), caretaking, and other populations (i.e. full-time workers, etc.) of candidates, who for valid reasons may have lower GPAs but can be just as or more successful.” Good news!
Lesson #1 for students: Do as well as you can in your courses but don’t assume that your GPA will be the most significant asset to your applications. Other experience and skills are also needed.
Second, in the same survey NACE also noticed a decreasing importance of an applicant’s college major when employers were choosing between equally qualified candidates. The major’s importance dropped compared to the previous year. The major falls below having relevant internship experience and especially having internship experience at that organization, which rose last year compared to previous years.
Lesson #2 for students: Employers are interested in your major but will probably become less so in the coming years. They’ll be interested in other aspects of your experience and application and so you’ll want to invest time, energy and thought into those, too!
In the CCEC, we like to use a phrase coined by a former Whitman Career Director, Susan Buchanan, who would say, “majors equals careers. Sometimes.” Her point was that there might be a close alignment between what you study and what you wind up doing but don’t spend too much time trying to make those two realms of life fit together.
In an effort to make this point for visual learners, several years ago our Marketing Fellow Abby Seethoff ’16 (Spanish and English double major) compiled 20 years of alumni data to show the enormous variety between majors and alumni career paths, which she called the Whitman Wayfinder.
Abby noted that Whitties often embrace non-linear paths from their major to their profession. In fact, many students study a subject they love at Whitman and then pursue a career in an entirely different field. The Wayfinder’s interactive Sankey diagram shows the majors and current professional sector of 20 years of recent Whitman grads and after a couple minutes of exploring this is clear that nearly any major might be the starting point for nearly any career.
Lesson #3 for students: Register for and declare what you enjoy reading, writing, talking and researching about. Take what you want to immerse yourself in so that you learn as much as you can. Except in a few cases (come talk with us about what those are) you can move toward almost any professional role from almost any major or department.
Students: best wishes with all of your many great choices this registration season and I wish you all a safe and restful Thanksgiving Break. If you find yourself spending time over the holiday talking about your post-Whitman plans, I’d love to hear about those discussions! Please feel free to let me know if any topics arise that would be useful to address in an upcoming issue.