Job Choice Under Uncertainty

As I mentioned in the last few posts, a successful organization has to deal with goals, rules and participants. From the perspective of the organization, participants are one of uncertainties that the company can control with reasonable goals, well-defined rules. In short, good management can help companies to solve uncertainties in certain situations. What about individuals? How do a manager or an employee deal with uncertainties? In this post, I want to talk about what actions can an individual (me) take to lower uncertainties or risks.

Based on the prompt given by Professor, the situation is that I am going to graduate and what will I do to reduce my uncertainty in job market. Let me begin from discussing my major, Economics, which is really not a risk-averse major. When I was going to graduate from my college, I talked to some of my professors that I’d like to purse my graduate degree so I can enhance my understanding of Economics and know more about how to apply economic knowledge in real life. Half of them told me that get a graduate degree is a good choice because you may find a better job or get higher payment with the degree. Another half encouraged me to apply to Economics PhD. “Why don’t you do PhD? You are not going to find a job easily with your master degree in Economics.” They told me.

We can learn two things from this experience: (1) graduate degree can earn you more money, and (2) econ graduate students cannot find job easily. The first one is a public-known truth. You can even learn this truth from some Econometric courses. The latter one is, however, more ambiguous. I didn’t realize that how hard for an econ student to find a job until I did some job seeking last semester. I found that companies are more interest on students who major in mathematics, statistics, or computer science. Maybe is because that students from those majors have better analytical skills or computer skills than econ students. At least companies think so.

There are still some places need economists, like Word Bank, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), or universities. Unfortunately, most positions in those places required an Econ PhD degree. So, my graduate degree is kind of in a grey area between undergraduate degree and PhD degree. My opinion is that choosing Economics major actually increases my uncertainty and risk in the job market. This major is unlike accountancy, finance or management which require students focus on a specific area. Even though I have taken mandatory accounting, financial, and managerial courses in my college, those classes didn’t make me more competitive in finding jobs related to Economics.

Since my major brings more uncertainty of what kind of jobs I can do in the future, I have to take some strategies to reduce the risk of being unemployed after graduation. I spent a lot of time on learning new stuff that I haven’t learned before, such as programing. Not only did I use STATA or R in my econometrics courses, I am also learning Python and Latex hoping someday I’ll have chance to apply those skills in my workplace. Well, more skills are better than less. Another thing I have to do is building my confidence. I can tell that Americans like confident people and most American students are more confident than me. They like to ask questions, answer teachers questions. Believe or not, Asian students don’t do these things in their schools.

Moreover, language is a high barrier for me, I understand most of conversations but it’s hard to express myself in a right way, or an American way. Maybe is because most of graduate students from my program are international students, and over 54% are Chinese students who speak Mandarin as well. Or maybe is because I didn’t spend enough time on learning American living style. Even I watched a lot of Hollywood movies and some American TV series, there are still some slang that I don’t understand. For example, I haven’t learned “soccer mom” in my English textbooks. My point is, to build confidence, language is an important factor which I really need to put more effort on.

What if companies do not like my skill sets and I cannot find a job in USA? In that case, I can still find a job back in my country. Some companies could hire me because I got my graduate degree in the States and UIUC is a well-known university. Either way, find a job in USA or back in my country, I believe that the result will be good enough for me. After all, have a job is better than unemployment.