After at least four years of hard study, you can’t blame undergraduates for feeling that, once they have received their scroll and thrown their cap in the air, they have all they need to get begin their career.
But more than ever, young graduates are finding themselves without the job they wanted – or find they have chosen the wrong path in the first place.
Further education can help build a career. A well-chosen masters degree, in particular, can get it moving in the direction you want it to go.
In Aberdeen, we benefit from having the oil industry on our doorstep. Nonetheless, many graduates find their first degree is not delivering the career they wanted or expected it to.
This is nothing new. I qualified as a civil engineer in the 1970s but quickly realised it wasn’t the career I wanted to follow.
After following a vocational course for four years, I worked in the profession for only 18 months. I then took off on what would now be called a gap year while I had a think about what I wanted to do with my life.
I had worked offshore roughnecking during my summer holidays and decided I needed to find a way to apply my engineering education to the oil field.
While visiting a friend in London, I was talked into visiting Imperial College, and before I knew it I was enrolled in a one-year masters in Petroleum Engineering.
The timing was good. The oil industry in the UK was taking off big time and there was a big shortage of petroleum engineers as the UK had only one small undergraduate course.
What started off as an uncertain and worrying time for me turned out to be the springboard for a career that took me all over the world before I came back to Aberdeen.
I was recently appointed director of the new Institute of Energy at the University of Aberdeen, where I’m getting a first-hand look at all the exciting work that is being done here in the energy sector.
The oil industry is still booming in Aberdeen and the renewable industry is starting to take off, so the demand for trained specialists in the energy industry is high, and a vocational masters degree is still a great way to kick-start your career.
At Aberdeen University alone, there are no fewer than 19 energy-related masters programmes in subjects as diverse as energy law, software project management, renewable energy, subsea engineering, hydrocarbon exploration, environmental science and oil and gas chemistry to name but a few.
All of these and the many others on offer have the ability to kick-start a career, take a career in a new direction or boost a career that is already under way.
Flexible learning means some degrees can be done part-time, and there are also shorter courses leading to a postgraduate diploma or certificate, allowing people to balance their studies without leaving the workforce.
To those in their final year of study, or those already in work and looking to boost their employability or change career direction, I would say: don’t see your undergraduate degree as the end of your formal education. Consider taking the plunge and do the extra study than can make all the difference.