In the upcoming months, students across the country will be graduating from college and heading into the real world.
But what type of world are they graduating into?
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Many Virginia Tech students say that they are already feeling the pressure of job hunting.
“I applied for around 250 internships and jobs for the summer, including co-ops and 12-week internships,” Lucas Kent, a junior majoring in biochemistry, said.
Economics professor Dr. Jadrian Wooten says that, ever since the pandemic, employers are in a “low-hire, low-fire” stage: keeping their employees around, leaving job openings scarce.
“Some of that is coming from [the fact that] we’re working later in life. We’re not retiring as early as we used to, so there’s not necessarily new job openings that are happening, which would normally be filled by college graduates,” Wooten said.
Another contributing factor is a student’s major, which might conflict with the actual jobs available.
“The business industry is seeing reductions or slowdowns compared to others. The tech industry has seen reductions compared to others,” Wooten said. “Things like education and health care have boomed over the past few years, but that’s not exactly a place that lots of college graduates are going.”
Wooten’s advice for college graduates? Think outside the box and look into other industries that could benefit from hiring someone from their major.
“If you’re a marketing major, looking at marketing inside of a hospital, if you are a management major, looking inside of social services or going through maybe a senior living facility, they’re going to have management jobs, they’re going to have accounting jobs, they’re going to have marketing jobs,” Wooten said.