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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
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The extra talent, combined with a decline in accounting jobs that CERI pegs at 4 percent to 6 percent, made competition for those jobs exceedingly tough in 2010. While it was hard on students, it was a plus for employers. “Candidates that might normally look for a job in banking or on Wall Street did a double major in finance or accounting,” says Paula Loop, U.S. and global talent leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. “A lot of students we hired had extra skills.”
At Deloitte, recruiters now use accounting’s crossover appeal to entice finance students as early as freshman year.
“Candidates have become more savvy. They learned from family members or friends before them that the more versatile they can be with their skill set, the more employable they are,” says Deloitte recruiting lead Scott McQuillan.
For the second year in a row, e-commerce jobs were among the fastest-growing opportunities for business undergraduates in the 2011 school year, according to the CERI report.
In 2008 and 2009, EBay says it concentrated its entry-level recruiting at fewer than 10 schools, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area such as the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford. That list has since grown to more than 20, and schools such as Georgia Tech, Cornell, the University of Illinois, and Arizona State University have emerged as reliable sources of talent, says EBay spokeswoman Sara Gorman. The company historically recruits students with degrees in computer science, finance, accounting, and marketing.
As recruiters like EBay cast a wider net for talent, at least one business school has developed a new program to produce it. The University of Washington Foster School of Business introduced a new master’s program in June that expands on its bachelor’s degree in information systems. The school interviewed companies including Boeing (BA), Costco (COST), and Ernst & Young to determine the skills employees need to improve their companies’ e-commerce operations, and built the program around them. Many classes cover emerging technologies, procurement, and inventory management.
Understanding mobile transactions and recognizing the potential in that arena is also integral, says EBay’s Gorman.
Recent college graduates are intimately familiar with “how people interact with their mobile phones in their lives today, and that’s extremely valuable,” she says.
Students searching for jobs in sales and marketing have likely had the toughest job search as those positions are most closely tied to the economy, says CERI’s Gardner.
About 29 percent of employers responding to the most recent CERI survey said they were looking to fill sales and marketing positions, down from 50 percent five years ago.
Marketing recruiting showed modest growth over last year. However, the jobs tend to favor students who pursue business degrees and supplement that education with creative skills, Gardner says. He notes that marketing has long been a discipline that students from non-business programs such as communications and journalism can break into, and entry for those students has become more difficult.
The tendency for marketing job applicants to have advanced analytical skills is increasingly evident at advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather.
In fall 2008 the firm ran a recruiting campaign at college business schools called “Plan C”—a slogan playing off the idea that working at an ad agency is the unthought-of, far-removed job option for students most focused on finance and management, says Ogilvy’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion Loren Monroe-Trice. In 2010 the campaign no longer seemed relevant. The firm had a flood of interest from finance and management students who viewed advertising as their primary choice, she says.
Non-business majors pursuing those types of jobs found the competition increasingly formidable, but business majors—or non-business majors with business skills—had less trouble. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2011 graduate Erin McClary majored in strategic communication. By choice, she took classes in business statistics, managerial accounting, financial accounting, and macro and micro economics. She accepted a marketing job at a Florida private equity firm this summer.
The job market benefits of methodically mapping out undergraduate coursework are another legacy of the financial crisis, says Eric Korogluyan, who graduated from Indiana University in May with a degree in finance. During his time at Indiana, he took several real estate courses simply because he was interested in the subject, as well as four accounting classes to make himself more marketable.
“There is always an element of luck,” says Korogluyan, an investment banking analyst in the Chicago office of BMO Capital Markets. “The goal is to mitigate that as much as possible so that you’re prepared no matter what kind of economy you’re looking at.”
Zlomek is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.
