Fields of study that guarantee… unemployment

Gone are the days when graduation guaranteed employment in a promising, well-paid position. But among the fields of study there are those that promise good work to graduates and those that are actually a guarantee of not finding it, at least in the profession they have learned.

People with higher education are much less likely to work on the so-called garbage, data from the Central Statistical Office show that eight out of ten graduates with higher education have an employment contract for an indefinite period, while primary school employees only half of this indicator. The unemployed with a university diploma also find a job much faster, staying in the registers of “intermediaries” for a shorter time. Every third person finds employment in less than 3 months, half of the people without education take over a year to do this art.

Graduates without hope

This statistic has a different face as well – it shows, however, that every year in the registers of offices there are thousands of university graduates, and the faculties they graduate are repeated. Only in 2014, PUPs all over Poland could find over 8,000 economists, over 7,000 educators and 2,500 political scientists. In some poviat labor offices, directors claim that their career has never received a job offer dedicated to a political scientist. In addition, the data on university graduates are understated – it is known that some of them do not register with employment offices at all, seeking employment through private intermediaries and agencies, others go abroad without seeing a future for themselves in the country, and still others believe that they will look for a job on their own faster.

A university diploma does not put a candidate for a job in a comfortable situation for a long time. Once elite, with a guarantee of quality, now it goes to people who would not be able to break through the examination sieve a dozen or so years ago. Some private universities quickly found an answer to the demand for diplomas and hand them over to those who are able to pay for them without unnecessary problems. Suffice it to say that in 2003 about 15 percent of Poles had higher education, today this status is achieved by almost every third person. Until recently, graduates earned twice as much as others, today it is only 1.5 times more – also because many masters not only work in professions that they did not study, but also because they undertake classes that are far below their qualifications.

Graduates of pedagogy have the least chance of finding a job in the profession. Over a million of them have entered the labor market in the last 20 years alone. This group also includes the aforementioned economists, political scientists and graduates of management and marketing, of whom there are approximately 700,000. Philosophers, sociologists, Polish philologists, administrators and historians also do not have great job opportunities. Many people will be surprised that psychologists and lawyers also have problems with finding a job in their profession.

New fields of study – will they really give employment?

The response of universities to the demographic decline is to launch new, defined as prospective, faculties. Some of them seem to be proposals created ad hoc, due to a certain fashion, others actually seem to be a response to the needs of the labor market. This applies in particular to those specializations that are closely related to local economies and make it possible to find employers who can undergo internships or summer internships already during studies. But as experts say, the future written in golden letters belongs to specialists from the IT industry. Mechatronics, database specialists, ICT specialists or IT network specialists will not have a problem with finding a good job. Biotechnologists and chemists will be in demand, especially when their knowledge can be used in the pharmaceutical and medical industries.
Graduates of geodesy and related fields of study are also extremely sought after. The knowledge of languages ​​is still included in the price, as long as they are not the most popular of them – English and German. BPO / SSC centers are waiting for graduates of linguistic studies, which are also a great place for the beginning of a professional career for university graduates. It is no wonder then that the offer of studies includes such fields as English-Chinese philology, Japanese studies, cultural studies with Far Eastern languages ​​or Czech in conjunction with the Russian language. Business needs force companies to care for their image not only in traditional media, but also in social media. Hence the popularity of directions related to new media and digital culture as well as management in social media.

The field of study does not count, only competences

About 10 percent of the unemployed are graduates. In the early 1990s, this percentage was only 2 percent. Despite this, the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy reassures that “the relatively favorable situation of university graduates on the labor market is confirmed by analyzes carried out by the Ministry of Labor, according to which an unemployed person with higher education has approximately 40% more chances of finding employment within a quarter than a person with secondary education “. This also applies to humanists, who by many are deleted at a loss in the fight for good job offers. Meanwhile, for many employers, apart from work experience, the so-called soft skills, as well as organizational skills, which humanists certainly do not lack. This is confirmed by statistics – in the group of engineers, unemployment in 2013 was 9.2 percent, and in the group of humanities – 6.3 percent.