By Ken Blake
Nurses can expect lots of job choices, and airline pilots can expect fat paychecks, according to the latest federal data on post-college careers ranging from accounting to zoology.
But no matter what major you’ve chosen, doing a little research and networking while you’re still in college can up your chances of success in the job market after you graduate, career advisers say.
An average of 203,700 jobs will come open for registered nurses each year between now and 2026, an analysis of estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates, by far the largest number of annual job openings among careers that require a bachelor’s degree and five or fewer years of experience.
Accountants and auditors rank second, with an estimated 141,800 job openings per year. The median for all careers requiring a bachelor’s degree and five or fewer years of experience is 6,800 open jobs per year, a figure typical for credit analysts, labor relations specialists, and teachers in adult basic and secondary education and literacy.
As for pay, airline pilots, copilots and flight engineers earned a median of $137,330 in 2017, according to the data, the highest median pay among careers requiring a bachelor’s degree and five or fewer years of experience.
Jobs in various types of engineering, management, software development and science also paid in the six-figure range during 2017, the data show. The 2017 median pay across all job types for people with a bachelor’s degree and five or fewer years of experience was $63,780.
But money isn’t everything, or even the first thing, one should consider when picking a career, according to Joe Tucibat, an adviser with MTSU’s Career Development Center.
“It kind of hurts my heart when I hear about people who take a job mostly, or even solely, for the income,” Tucibat said. “So much of the work I’ve done in counseling and career counseling, especially, is all about finding out who you are and what your values are, what your story is, and where that can go.”
Tucibat said he urges students to choose jobs in which they can apply skills they’re both good at and enjoy using. Doing so will help them feel more engaged with the work, more motivated to expand their skills, and more likely to branch out into new areas of responsibility. The more one does those things, the more valuable one becomes to an employer.
“At that point, you can say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m doing a lot more stuff than I was originally hired to do. Can we talk about compensation?'”
Meanwhile, building and maintaining a network of potential employers can produce opportunities even in careers with relatively few job openings, Tucibat said.
Well before graduation, a student should begin identifying people who work at the types of places where the student would like to get hired, e-mailing those people to ask for career advice, and asking to connect on LinkedIn with those who respond, he said.
Students who work hard at it will end up with a database of contacts likely to offer a job after graduation or at least likely to know where a job can be found, Tucibat said.
Laura Brown, director of operations for Lonely Planet, urges graduates to remember that progress in one’s career today doesn’t necessarily mean a straight climb up the company ladder.
“It’s not a ladder anymore,” Brown said. “It’s a jungle gym. What that means is that, sometimes, to go forward, you have to go sideways. Sometimes, in order to get more money, you have to jump to a new company. Sometimes, in order to accommodate life things that happen, you have to go down a little bit and sideways, then back up.”
People entering the workforce should realize that they don’t have to have their whole careers planned out right away, Brown said.
“You have time,” she said. “You have more time than you think you do to get your career started.”
The latest unemployment figures hold especially good news for MTSU graduates who want to find jobs locally. The Nashville metro area has the lowest unemployment rate of any metro area in the state.
The Nashville area’s 2.6 percent unemployment rate for November 2018 fell notably below the next-lowest unemployment rate in the state: 3.2 percent in both the Knoxville and Chattanooga areas. Memphis and Clarksville tied for the highest rate. Both came in at 3.8 percent unemployed for the month.
The Data Reporter 