Finding Work as an Economics Major: Know Your Skills

Believe it or not, there are many opportunities in the job market for recent economics graduates in the United States and beyond. The trick to finding these opportunities knows where to look and how to advertise the very marketable skills you have picked up in your college’s Economics department.

Look for companies with a need for experts who know how to “drill down” into data and come up with answers that can help companies increase their profit margins. Consider everything you learned in economics classes and the skills you have spent years and tens of thousands of dollars cultivating:

• Manipulating data. As an economics major, you have been crunching the numbers for years. Companies looking for ways to improve their market share or at least find out why their sales figures and other data look the way they do need people who can find relationships between data.

• Understanding relationships. For the economics major, finding relationships between data has been ingrained in their brain for years. Econ majors know what typically contributes to higher or lower sales, market penetration, and other factors that businesses need to know about.

• Learning about disruptions. Part of any economics major’s education is learning which products, business models, industries, and regions disrupted economies and markets in the past and why. Econ majors know all the factors contributing to effective disruption.

• Communication. As an Econ major, you have argued your complicated points using complicated data using clear language in an articulate manner. This skill is often a lost art at many different corporations around the world.

Andrew Charlton earned a Doctorate in Economics from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He advised then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on economic policy during the global economic crisis of 2008 and has written many books and articles, including Fair Trade for All, with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. 

Visit http://www.wheelercentre.com/people/andrew-charlton for more information.