Determined to go to college but not sure what to major in? Don’t fret, you are not alone. Most kids your age have little if any idea what they would like to do.
Part of the problem is, you don’t know what you don’t know. After all, you’re only 18 or so, and have likely yet to receive your baptism by fire of what employers are truly seeking. Hint: knowing what employers are seeking is pretty darn important. If you don’t offer what they seek, then they’re not going to hire you. It’s that simple.
Most schools don’t offer much help to inoculate you from the shock of disappointment in the job hunt after graduation, either. They gladly accept you (and your tuition dollars), fill your head with useless knowledge, then they feed you to the wolves – figuratively speaking – after they give you a degree in some fluffy or overgeneralized subject.
There is a fairly simple way to avoid all this shock and disappointment, and can save you a lot of wasted time studying the wrong things in the process. Before you go to college, or even apply for one, log on to some major job-posting website, be it CareerBuilder, Monster, Indeed, or something closely related.
For example, if you want to work for some sort of company you think would offer great jobs and would pay well, search for jobs on those websites that the company is looking to fill. If you want to work at the corporate headquarters of, say, Coca-Cola, find out what jobs they need filling, and within those jobs, what sort of skills are required? Same thing goes for any other company, be it Lockheed-Martin, FedEx, IBM, Frito Lay, Anheuser-Busch, Ford, Ely Lilly, GE, and the like.
This exercise shall yield two benefits, both of which are linked. One is that it will teach you what sort of opportunities are out there. From there, you can evaluate them and narrow down the job you’d like to land after graduation. Once you complete that step, you can then tailor your educational strategy to meet the job criteria.
I call this engineering your education and skills. In engineering, the most fundamental question we ask is, “what are the requirements?”. We can thus apply the same approach to choosing an educational/skills-building path. Find out what job opportunities are out there, what sort of occupations companies have to offer, then figure out what it takes to acquire the necessary skills in order to seize these incredible opportunities. It’s not complicated. It just takes the understanding of these requirements early on in order to avoid lots of closed doors and frustrations in the years to come.
Here’s another way of looking at it: when people start up businesses, they aim to find an unmet (or underserved) need in the marketplace, and fill it. If they don’t aim to do so, or fail to effectively fill a need, they won’t be in business long. As CEO of You, Inc., your mission is the same approach. The jobs that are out there are those where employers have unmet needs they have to fill. Find which need you are best at filling, and set out to fill it.
So, research what opportunities are out there, find the ones that you can fill the most effectively, and acquire the necessary skills accordingly. Doing so will help put us all in the best positions where we can learn, grow, and contribute together.