Do Employers Label Students Because Of Their Majors?
Many graduate students may feel self labelled upon graduation or when applying for graduate jobs or graduate schemes
. This may occur because of number of reasons one of which may be major subject undertaken during the university course. As most of us know at majority of universities students are obliged to choose some subjects that will become their core subjects "" majors. These subjects would be studied to a greater extent by students that have chosen them as core subjects rather than by students that did chose them as optional subjects.
This may create labels on students and students that studied particular subject such as humanities may be labelled as liberal art students whereas students undertaking business subjects may be seen as realistic or materialistic. One may argue that these labels are wrong and students should not be categorized into these categories once applying for graduate jobs unrelated to their subject they studied. To justify the above, one of the reasons that may be put forward is that students develop at university not only technical knowledge necessary to perform well once in graduate job or on graduate scheme or trainee management programme but also they develop other personal qualities such as team working, time management, communications abilities and other transferable skills that are directly related to variety of different jobs. A number of career coaches advocate that technical aspects of the job can be easily learnt; nevertheless what is more important is the motivation of individual and drive to succeed. Thus, it may concluded that students regardless of the subject they studied may have more or less equal chances to succeed in graduate job, graduate scheme or some other trainee management development programme and therefore should not be labelled by graduate employers that chose them for the prestigious graduate job, graduate schemes or trainee management programmes by the subject area they studied.
On the other hand, employers could argue that technical aspect of the subject studied are decisive should students succeed in graduate job or on graduate scheme. For example, employers may feel that students entering their organization should have sound technical knowledge of their business. One can argue that this may reduce employer training cost as the expense to train young recruits is likely to be lower since the time the students need to spend learning technical aspects of the graduate job, or task that need to be undertaken on graduate scheme would be shorter and students could learn other aspect of the job earlier.