For Career Success, Majors Matter Less Than 'Minoring In Work Readiness'

Students, parents and pundits often fret over which academic majors or concentrations are the best for setting students up for success after college. But when it comes to preparing for long-term, meaningful career success, other factors can weigh more heavily than a student’s major. Research suggests that students should be more concerned about hitting the mark on three critical aspects of the college experience that greatly enhance their career opportunities after graduation: an internship, a long-term project, and an industry-recognized credential.

The notion that career paths tend to be well-defined and ‘linear’ is largely outdated. Some are. But many end up looking more like meandering, squiggly messes. Trends suggest nonlinear career paths are becoming the norm and will be the future given how rapidly technology, markets and jobs are changing. Non-linear career trajectories require lifelong learning and skill enhancement, and a student’s specific academic focus or major will become less important than other critical experiences that broadly prepare them for success.???

The largest representative study of college graduates in U.S. history (the Gallup-Purdue Index ) shed great light on the pathway to producing work-ready, thriving graduates. College graduates who complete an internship applying classroom learning in the workplace and those who work on a long-term project (spanning a semester or longer) are twice as likely to be meaningfully engaged in their work later in life. Further, students with a college internship double their odds of having a good job upon graduation . This, in turn, dramatically boosts both their immediate and long-term earnings . Completing an internship and a long-term project in college can be career game changers.?

In terms of what employers want most from a recent graduate, relevant work experiences and skills are at the top of the list. In fact, employers cite internship experience as the top deciding factor between two similarly qualified college graduate job applicants. Employers also value and prefer broadly educated and specifically skilled graduates: they value a bachelor’s degree, but they want to see that combined with a specific industry skill.

Pairing an industry-recognized credential with a bachelor’s degree is a winning combination in the job market. This is evident in a fascinating market research survey that asked about hiring preferences when selecting among three hypothetical candidates: one with a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity, one with a bachelor’s degree in English and one with a bachelor’s degree in English and a cybersecurity credential. The English major with an industry-recognized cybersecurity credential beats the cybersecurity major by a factor of 3 and the English major by a factor of 4. ???

Differential outcomes between liberal arts or humanities and STEM graduates may be more about their relative rates of internship completion than the subjects they studied. From the same Gallup data previously referenced, 67% of engineering graduates strongly agreed they had an internship during college compared to only 29% of arts and humanities graduates. Variance in earnings are more closely correlated with whether a graduate had completed an internship than with their chosen field of study: while arts and humanities majors were less likely to have an internship, those who did have similar earnings to engineering majors.

The best advice for college students? Study what most inspires you but be sure to do these three things as part of your college experience: complete an internship, carry out a long-term project (a semester or longer), and obtain an industry-recognized credential.

Note: a version of this article was previously published on Forbes.com .