So many college graduates are working in fields that are not what they graduated in. I am not talking about non-Stem degrees, but even people with STEM-related degrees not getting jobs in their fields.
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experience requirement is one part – a lot of jobs will advertise and add in “2+ years experience” kind of tag on it. College kids aren’t going to have the experience they’re looking for – they want candidates that have done the job before and familiar enough in the field without having to train or teach them basics.
oversaturation is another part – computer science and programming is really common these days, mixed with people who have been doing it for 20+ years and people graduating fresh out of school for it. Lets say there’s 185,000 programmer jobs available – if there’s around 18,500,000 people with the skills, experience, and education to do it, there’s only 1 job available for 100 people. (these are rough figures from google, but paint the idea that just because one career might be lucrative or make a lot of money, if there’s not enough jobs available, there’s going to be a lot of people taking jobs not in their field).
demand is another part – relating to the above; programmers are relatively high in demand, but what 1 or a small team of people can do still isn’t enough to offer work to them all. This isn’t the same for something like a surgeon, or health care worker, where demand is pretty much going to remain high, especially as average age increases and people live longer, we’re going to need someone to replace hips or handle a bedpan. These would be the opposite of oversaturation; there’s almost always openings in health care of *some* kind, just not nearly enough people choosing health care as a career that matches their education.
overeducation is a small part, but still there – someone with a masters degree will likely be declined work from lower level work; McDonalds isn’t going to hire them if they can avoid it, because that person will likely ask for a higher wage or salary. The kid still in highschool they might have a hassle of scheduling, but they can pay them minimum wage and no one bats an eye. Perhaps not entirely relevant to “getting a job in your field”, but still relevant to *getting a job, period.*
;;
As an anecdote of the above…
My aunt got a masters and later doctorate in psychology, social sciences, with a minor in native american anthropology. She wanted to be a family counselor, ideally, but she would have settled for therapist, social work, a CPS case worker, that kind of thing – anything that involved helping people mentally.
Except where she lived, and was unwilling to move for openings, no one had space for a fresh out of college therapist, everyone running a family counselling business wasn’t hiring, she was overeducated to work as a government social worker or with CPS because she would have asked a higher wage and they denied her several times.
It isn’t that psychology, social sciences, and anthropology aren’t valuable; they just weren’t applicable – she had no experience to take out a business loan and open her own practice. She was trying to enter a job market where jobs were already filled and not in demand. For her “not ideal but still in field” jobs, she was overeducated and even the government didn’t want to pay her fair compensation to match her degree of education when they could instead hire someone else they could pay less for the same job.
She ended up becoming a groundskeeper at the same college she got her degree at, to make ends meet, and despite repeated attempts to find work that used her major, didn’t find too much success – eventually just giving up entirely and finding a simple kind of happiness as a groundskeeper. She later found some work using her minor more than her major, being a curator of sorts for the native american heritage museum, though that work was a glorified tour guide of a few exhibits & sell gifts and nick-knacks (it was a small museum you’d expect to find as a tourist attraction in a reservation).
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