The Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce has just released a document on the economic value of college majors (http://gisandscience.com/2011/05/24/what%E2%80%99s-the-value-of-a-geography-degree/) . Although a US based study, the report still has relevance for UK graduates in what is increasingly an international market for the best jobs. The report also highlights gender and ethnic differences in subject areas as well as the types of employment people in different subject areas tend to get. The first clear result is that in the US any degree is better than none in terms of deferential earning power. Although classified as a Social Science, geography does quite well in comparison with other subjects in its grouping coming in fourth behind economics,statistics and political science with a median income of $54,000. Economics tends to inflate the median and average for this grouping having a median earnings of $70,000. In the Physical Sciences, Geological and Earth Sciences have a median income of $62,000. an important consideration to bear in mind is the time scale and the position in their working life or career fro each individual in the survey. some degrees lead to a clear career path and act as entrances to major industries that can inflate the earnings fro particular subject areas. It may not come as a surprise that the highest earning subjects are Petroleum Geology followed by Pharmacy and then Administration (I do find that one a hit worrying but that may just be me!) It is also interesting that the subject areas of Counseling Psychology and Early Childhood Education are amongst the lowest earnings despite the importance of such work - an interesting illustration of the problem of social worth versus economic value maybe? .
Showing posts with label employability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label employability. Show all posts
Monday, June 17, 2013
Monday, July 9, 2012
What Can I Do With Geography 2?
In Geographical , September 2011 (see http://www.geographical.co.uk/ for magazien website plus their blog) there is a very good set of cameos from geographers who have found their training useful for their current employment. The foreword from Dr Rita Gardner, the Director of the RGS (with IBG) provides a bit of context but it is the sketches of the geographers that is most informative about why geography is so useful. The individuals arrange from an air traffic control specialist, through the seemingly more exciting jobs of adventurer and helicopter pilot, to socially aware jobs of activism coordinator at Oxfam founder of Green Economic Institute. Additionally, renewable energy, water resources engineer, environmental consultant and transport logistic manager all get a look in as well as the maybe more expected and traditional trainee teacher. The important point that all of these individuals make is that geography has proven to be extremely useful to their chosen career path even if they didn’t believe it at first. Well worth a read if you are trying to justify taking the subject up to some non-believers.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Multiple Intelligences and Employability
Students often ask what employers are looking for. As with most things the answer is – it depends! One thing is clear though – leaving university with a good degree may be a good start BUT everyone else who is going to apply for the job you want will have a good degree as well. So the question becomes how do you make yourself distinct, unique, a sought after product?
It maybe useful to think about the skills you have gained in terms of different types of intelligences as outlined by Howard Gardner. Gardner suggested that there are many and different types of intelligence as in the list below.
It might be useful to think about the job you are applying for in relation to these types of intelligence. Which type or types do you think the job is most concerned with? In what order do you think an employer would rank these intelligences? Would the ranking be the same for every job? How do you demonstrate to your potential employee that you have that type of intelligence? A degree might be able to demonstrate a logical-mathematical intelligence, depending on the subject matter of the degree. Similarly, you might expect a holder of a degree to have linguistic intelligence and a geographer to have spatial and naturalist intelligence. Beyond having a degree how would you demonstrate these intelligences? Would your employer expect you to have all these intelligences or can you develop some of these in post to help further your career?
Other types of intelligences would seem to be important for developing a career as well. High interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences show an ability to understand other people and yourself as well as an ability to interact effectively with others in the context of work. I would suggest that a moral intelligence is also a keen feature for career development. The ability to work within a moral framework and to show that will help to develop trust between yourself and your colleagues. This may seem like a minor skill compared to the hours you may have spent figuring out how to understand multiple regression but it is an intelligence that will enable you to interact with others without them worrying about your motives. It is an intelligence that will engender trust in you and what you do – a vital component for career development. Really it is about your character and what how you project that to others. The problem is how do you show that you have any of these seemingly intangible intelligences? I would suggest that voluntary work is a good way to show both your existential and moral intelligence as well as developing these intelligences and your intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. Voluntary work will also make your CV a little bit different from others.
Intelligence Characteristics
Interpersonal Capacity to understand others, to recognize their abilities, motivations and values. Allows effective working with others.
Intrapersonal Capacity to continually and accurately self-assess and to sue that understand to alter or maintain effective relationships with others
Linguistic Sensitivity to spoken and written word. Capacity to communicate thoughts and ideas effectively.
Logical-Mathematical Capacity to identify, analyse and solve problems mathematically and scientifically.
Spatial Capacity to identify patterns and understand rand model eality relationally in space.
Naturalist Capacity to identify and classify reality based on pattern recognition and to be sensitive and flexible enough to modify this depending on context
Body-kinesthetic Capacity to use body or parts of body to solve problems. Mental abilities co-ordinate movements of body.
Musical Capacity to perform, compose and appreciate musical patterns.
Existential Concern for ultimate issues. Could be seen as your religious outlook.
Moral Concern with rules, behaviours and attitudes that govern your life and the lives of others. Ethics and morals.
Howard Gardner has published these ideas in the books below:
It maybe useful to think about the skills you have gained in terms of different types of intelligences as outlined by Howard Gardner. Gardner suggested that there are many and different types of intelligence as in the list below.
It might be useful to think about the job you are applying for in relation to these types of intelligence. Which type or types do you think the job is most concerned with? In what order do you think an employer would rank these intelligences? Would the ranking be the same for every job? How do you demonstrate to your potential employee that you have that type of intelligence? A degree might be able to demonstrate a logical-mathematical intelligence, depending on the subject matter of the degree. Similarly, you might expect a holder of a degree to have linguistic intelligence and a geographer to have spatial and naturalist intelligence. Beyond having a degree how would you demonstrate these intelligences? Would your employer expect you to have all these intelligences or can you develop some of these in post to help further your career?
Other types of intelligences would seem to be important for developing a career as well. High interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences show an ability to understand other people and yourself as well as an ability to interact effectively with others in the context of work. I would suggest that a moral intelligence is also a keen feature for career development. The ability to work within a moral framework and to show that will help to develop trust between yourself and your colleagues. This may seem like a minor skill compared to the hours you may have spent figuring out how to understand multiple regression but it is an intelligence that will enable you to interact with others without them worrying about your motives. It is an intelligence that will engender trust in you and what you do – a vital component for career development. Really it is about your character and what how you project that to others. The problem is how do you show that you have any of these seemingly intangible intelligences? I would suggest that voluntary work is a good way to show both your existential and moral intelligence as well as developing these intelligences and your intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. Voluntary work will also make your CV a little bit different from others.
Intelligence Characteristics
Interpersonal Capacity to understand others, to recognize their abilities, motivations and values. Allows effective working with others.
Intrapersonal Capacity to continually and accurately self-assess and to sue that understand to alter or maintain effective relationships with others
Linguistic Sensitivity to spoken and written word. Capacity to communicate thoughts and ideas effectively.
Logical-Mathematical Capacity to identify, analyse and solve problems mathematically and scientifically.
Spatial Capacity to identify patterns and understand rand model eality relationally in space.
Naturalist Capacity to identify and classify reality based on pattern recognition and to be sensitive and flexible enough to modify this depending on context
Body-kinesthetic Capacity to use body or parts of body to solve problems. Mental abilities co-ordinate movements of body.
Musical Capacity to perform, compose and appreciate musical patterns.
Existential Concern for ultimate issues. Could be seen as your religious outlook.
Moral Concern with rules, behaviours and attitudes that govern your life and the lives of others. Ethics and morals.
Howard Gardner has published these ideas in the books below:
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Employable Skills: Knowledge-based Economy and Geography
The matrix I used in a previous blog on careers highlighted the relationship between your value and your replaceability, pointing out that it is very good idea to have highly valued skills that are unique to you making you hard to replace. The Royal Geographical Society website ‘Careers with Geography’ has a lot of resources that highlight the skills that you can gain from Geography and why these are important skills to take to the workplace.
http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Study+Geography/Study/Careers+with+geography.htm
An important question to ask is what are the high value skills that make you irreplaceable? In a knowledge-based economy any individual will need to show the ability or capability to learn, but in addition geographers have a world-view, a view of the world as a series of spatial relations that is almost unique.
Why this capability and uniqueness of world is view such an important issue in a knowledge–based economy? It is important to think about what a ‘knowledge-based economy’ actually could mean. What is knowledge? How does knowledge differ from ‘mere’ information? Are the two related? According to Nicholas Rescher (Complexity: A philosophical overview, 1998), knowledge is distinguished from information by its significance – knowledge is information that has exceeded some threshold of significance. I would add that knowledge implies understanding of information, a sort of higher-level information (hence the threshold idea). Just collecting additional information does not necessarily increase your knowledge – you need to extract knowledge from the information, so knowing how to change infromation to a form from which you cna extract knowledge is vital as is the process of extraction itself.
Rescher suggests that knowledge, K, is the log of information, I. As a simple formula that is:
K = log I
Although he expands upon this simple idea, the basic point is clear. The amount of knowledge you have does not increase at the same rate as the amount of information you need from which to extract that knowledge. Knowledge increases at a slower rate than information and you need increasing amounts of information to extract that extra knowledge. It can take longer if you have a lot of information already accumulated to develop new or novel knowledge. Graphing this relationship gives you something like the figure below. Increasing the amount of information only increases the level of knowledge slightly, but there can be breaks, rapid changes in our understanding of information due to increased knowledge that suddenly lead to a glut of understanding. These rapid changes are followed by periods of relatively quiet where information accumulates again and knowledge develops slowly. Kuhn, back in the 1960s used a similar “stasis and change” model for paradigm change in science.
So what has this got to do with employability skills? Well this model suggests that there are two things that a knowledge-based economy needs: information and knowledge. Geographers are well placed through the skills they learn to provide both. They have the techniques needed to go out and collect information in an appropriate manner (remember information is never just collected- there is always a purpose to the collection). Skills such as collection and analysis of census data, surveying, GIS construction and analysis provides the raw materials for converting vast amounts of information to a form that can be understood and interpreted. Then the second skills knowledge or rather extraction of understanding from the pool of information. As well as analytical techniques and tools such as statistics and GIS, geographers also have that spatial and relational mode of thinking that can create links and find patterns, converting information to understanding, to knowledge.
http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Study+Geography/Study/Careers+with+geography.htm
An important question to ask is what are the high value skills that make you irreplaceable? In a knowledge-based economy any individual will need to show the ability or capability to learn, but in addition geographers have a world-view, a view of the world as a series of spatial relations that is almost unique.
Why this capability and uniqueness of world is view such an important issue in a knowledge–based economy? It is important to think about what a ‘knowledge-based economy’ actually could mean. What is knowledge? How does knowledge differ from ‘mere’ information? Are the two related? According to Nicholas Rescher (Complexity: A philosophical overview, 1998), knowledge is distinguished from information by its significance – knowledge is information that has exceeded some threshold of significance. I would add that knowledge implies understanding of information, a sort of higher-level information (hence the threshold idea). Just collecting additional information does not necessarily increase your knowledge – you need to extract knowledge from the information, so knowing how to change infromation to a form from which you cna extract knowledge is vital as is the process of extraction itself.
Rescher suggests that knowledge, K, is the log of information, I. As a simple formula that is:
K = log I
Although he expands upon this simple idea, the basic point is clear. The amount of knowledge you have does not increase at the same rate as the amount of information you need from which to extract that knowledge. Knowledge increases at a slower rate than information and you need increasing amounts of information to extract that extra knowledge. It can take longer if you have a lot of information already accumulated to develop new or novel knowledge. Graphing this relationship gives you something like the figure below. Increasing the amount of information only increases the level of knowledge slightly, but there can be breaks, rapid changes in our understanding of information due to increased knowledge that suddenly lead to a glut of understanding. These rapid changes are followed by periods of relatively quiet where information accumulates again and knowledge develops slowly. Kuhn, back in the 1960s used a similar “stasis and change” model for paradigm change in science.
So what has this got to do with employability skills? Well this model suggests that there are two things that a knowledge-based economy needs: information and knowledge. Geographers are well placed through the skills they learn to provide both. They have the techniques needed to go out and collect information in an appropriate manner (remember information is never just collected- there is always a purpose to the collection). Skills such as collection and analysis of census data, surveying, GIS construction and analysis provides the raw materials for converting vast amounts of information to a form that can be understood and interpreted. Then the second skills knowledge or rather extraction of understanding from the pool of information. As well as analytical techniques and tools such as statistics and GIS, geographers also have that spatial and relational mode of thinking that can create links and find patterns, converting information to understanding, to knowledge.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Going Places With Geography!
Following on from thinking about what you can do with Geography there are a couple of very useful videos produced by the RGS (Royal Geographical Society) available on Youtube that are a little old now (4 years and counting) but are still very worthwhile looking at.
They are 'Going Places With Geography Part 1' and, the unsurpirsingly named 'Going Places With Geography Part 2'!
They are 'Going Places With Geography Part 1' and, the unsurpirsingly named 'Going Places With Geography Part 2'!
These videos are good, general introductions to the possiblities that geography opens up for graduates as well as illustrating the use of the 'transferable skills' the subject can provide. A quick thought on 'transferable skills' as well - lots of subjects provide a great deal of the generic transferable skills that you hear about such as the abiltiy to write for different audiences, numeracy, data analysis and presentation skills. Mentioning that the subject provides them is fine but what evidence do you have that you ahve acquired them? How do you show someone, an employer maybe, that you have acquired these skills? View the videos in this light - do those involved show these transferable skills? Do they focus on general skills or do they show these transferable skills through their discussion of subject specific skills? Maybe the confidence you get from studying a subject you enjoy and understand helps you to demonstrate 'transferable skills'. Skills without this sort of context maybe difficult to demonstrate.
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