This is a continuation of one of the long-term ancillary goals of this site, which to alert people about “passion traps”, or blindly follow one’s passion as a career, only to fall into a financial and/or career-hobbling booby trap.
If you want to see how this series began, here is Part 1.
All that aside, let us delve into the latest case study of what not to do, in this case, how not to pursue one’s education.
A recent Business Insider article came to my attention, whose lengthy headline read “A millennial who’s been looking for a job for over 4 years says his degrees have offered little value”. This quickly caught my eye, as for a while, I had been in the same boat as this guy. After all, I had a master’s degree, yet for the longest time was stuck working low-paying grunt jobs. Needless to say, I was more than intrigued at this guy’s story.
What I found was that the article cited chapter and verse of how not to pursue one’s education, let alone choose one’s career.
Shortly into the article, I found my first red flags. The protagonist of this story, a Mr. Roland Hesmondhalgh, was working part-time as a photojournalist while earning a degree in…multiplatform journalism (yes, apparently that’s a thing). He thought it would lead to a full-time job, but instead, he got laid off.
Sigh. I mock such majors sarcastically as “growth industries” (to clarify, they are not) for a reason. Did Mr. Hesmondhalgh not notice that newspapers are cutting staff right and left? Did he also not notice that journalism jobs have far more people who want to do such jobs than there are open positions to actually do them? Even the article makes note that a broader hiring shutdown within the industry has [obviously] not helped matters in his case. When it comes to journalism-related jobs, the supply of talent greatly outweighs the demand for it.
Which begs the question, did the protagonist in this article stop to consider these industry trends and thus reconsider his line of work? There is no indication that he did.
The article proceeds to note that he does occasional freelance gigs doing photography or YouTube scriptwriting, “which he says pays very little”. No kidding. Again, supply greatly outweighs the demand. Look, I love photography. I am an incurable shutterbug. But I realized very early on that there was no way I could make a career out of it. So, what I did was I developed marketable skills to work my way into a good-paying job, and I could enjoy my hobby of photography on the side.
So, after such humbling experiences, did Mr. Hesmondhalgh wise up and realize that journalism is a dead-end career option for most people, and work to develop marketable skills instead?
Sadly, no. Even more sadly, he doubled down on the dead-end option, and went back to school to get a master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University (hint: not a cheap place to attend).
Repeat after me: there are few bigger wastes of time and money than getting a master’s degree in journalism.
So, did getting that master’s degree in journalism open any new doors for him in terms of job opportunities?
No. I’ll be generous in saying that this is a trap lots of millennials fell into, and it’s not entirely their fault. Many of us were sold a bill of goods when it came to grad school. In my case, when I went into business school straight out of college, folks in admissions sold us on the idea that it could lead to career changes. That was B.S. How can you have a career change if you have no career with which to begin? Let’s be frank: they just wanted our tuition money, and then once our coursework was complete, they fed us to the wolves, job market-wise. Perhaps that lesson gradually dawned on Mr. Hesmondhalgh, too.
He also notes that having a master’s degree shuts him out of most entry-level jobs, since potential employers see him as over-qualified. Again, that happened to me as well after I earned my MBA, which is a far more practical degree than one in journalism. Had I known about that beforehand, I would have thought twice about grad school.
This leads us to a takeaway I have noted before and shall note again. The only time it makes any sense at all to attend grad school is under the following conditions:
- You already have a job.
- Getting a master’s is part of the established path within the organization for career advancement.
- You get the company to pay for it.
Mr. Hesmondhalgh acknowledges that what jobs he has managed to hold down are “low-level grunt work”, and I deeply empathize and sympathize with him on that front, having been in those shoes myself.
After all this time, though, did he finally learn his lesson and earn some sort of hard, marketable skills (e.g., accounting, coding, etc.)?
Nope. Instead, he continues his education (that’s good)…through Harvard’s creative writing program (that’s bad). Why is that bad? Because creative writing is another line of work where, like journalism, the supply greatly outweighs the demand.
Perhaps he wants to be a writer? Okay, but most writers need a day job to support themselves, for the same above reason (supply outweighing demand), and much of the article is understandably devoted to his struggles in that key area. Some people never learn, apparently.
So, the question arises, is there any potential way out of such a deep career hole that he naively dug for himself? To my mind, there is. What he and others in his position need to do is sit down with a competent career counselor of some sort and look at two things. The first thing is to actually see what companies hire for (i.e., hard skills-based jobs), and then figure out which jobs he could realistically train for. Once conclusions are reached, start formulating a game plan around that
But that would first require an acknowledgement on Hesmondhalgh’s part that journalism is a dead-end for a career.
But what about the master’s degree and how it make’s one overqualified in the eyes of most employers? Well, I leave my MBA off my resume. Simple as that. Cut your losses and move on. I finally got my first full-time white collar job (with benefits, no less!) at age 31, and I did it while still finishing up an associate’s degree.
Give the writers of the article this much credit: they acknowledge that the cost of college and pursuing a degree may not be worth it to some people. This leads us to the last big point for now. So many of us millennials got suckered into the “just go to college and everything will be fine” mantra. Implicit in that mantra was, whatever degree you earn, that qualifies you for that job. But then, after graduating, we found that there are factors far more powerful than just an undergraduate degree, such as help that companies actually need in order to increase their productivity and thus improve their bottom line. That needed help is the driving force behind job creation in the first place.
To put things another way, what sort of jobs is someone with an undergraduate degree in, say, political science or gender studies actually qualified to do?
To bring this full-circle, it turns out that being a “multiplatform journalist” is not the kind of help most companies need to grow in prosperity.
So, to recap, let us review the key takeaways:
- Avoid pursuing jobs where the supply greatly outweighs the demand.
- Avoid grad school, unless you are in a position wherein
- You already have a job
- Getting a master’s degree is an established path for career advancement within your company
- The company pays for it
- Just getting a degree in a (e.g.) journalism does not automatically mean you will get a job in journalism upon graduation.
- Market forces and jobs that companies need fulfilled in order to prosper are the realities that reinforce takeaway No. 3.
- If you are in the position of the protagonist of this article, get help in figuring out what jobs you could train for that companies will actually hire you for. Spoiler alert: those jobs do not include journalists.
If we heed these above points, we shall be in a better position to channel our education and training in a far more productive manner. In so doing, we shall do our part in adding real value to our communities and to the economy as a whole, and put us in optimal positions to continue to learn and grow together.
Food for thought:
Watch the video below. FF to 2:55. When Mike Rowe notes that many people with degrees are competing for a narrow set of opportunities that polite society has dubbed “good careers”. Journalism clearly falls within that alleged good career category. But Mr. Hesmondhalgh’s perils should suggest to us that maybe polite society has a thing or two to learn about what makes for a “good career”.