If you want to improve your odds of getting a high-paying job after finishing your education, forget that English degree. A new report by Workopolis suggests that nursing and pharmacy students are most likely to land employment in their field after graduation.
The study, which analyzed more than seven million resumes on the job search website, found that 97 per cent of those who studied nursing, whether it was at the bachelor, masters or PhD level, are working in jobs related to their education.
Other degrees that showed the highest return included pharmacy (94 per cent); computer science (91 per cent); engineering (90 per cent) and human resources (88 per cent).
Although health care jobs may be the most plentiful, data from Statistics Canada shows that engineering jobs are the highest-paying. Engineering graduates, on average, earned $76,000 as a starting salary, followed by healthcare graduates with $69,600; computer science graduates with $68,000 and law and math graduates with $67,600.
Tara Talbot, vice-president of human resources at Workopolis, says students need to follow their passions but should also be aware that their choice of study could affect how easy or difficult it will be to get a job.
It’s also important to keep in mind that along with hard skills such as a specific degree, employers also value graduates with “soft skills” such as communication, teamwork and problem solving abilities.
Meanwhile, the study also suggests that Canadians are more educated now than they were in 2000, even though the majority say their degrees are not relevant to their current jobs. Despite spending longer in school, 73 per cent of those who recently answered a poll on the job site say their degrees are not related to their jobs. More than half (56 per cent) believe they’re overeducated for their position.
Over a period of 2 weeks, over 3,600 people participated in the poll. The polling industry’s professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error as they are not a random sample and therefore are not necessarily representative of the whole population.
Source: Macleans