Your Career and Studies Don’t Need to Sync Up, Here's Why...

There are times when after your studies, you feel as if you need to find a career that perfectly matches your schooling. For example, maybe you feel as if a background in Finance requires some type of Banking role, or a background in English Literature means you need to be a writer, teacher, or other academic.

In reality, your studies are simply the stepping stones to help you walk down your career path, and it doesn't necessarily mean you need to stick to it or even go down that road.

Why it doesn’t need to be the same

While your studies help you prepare for a job and eventually a career, they are theoretical in many cases. When you go out for that first job, you'll quickly see that your studies are rarely used at the onset. Observe the example of someone graduating in business management. Obviously, there's a good chance your first role out there will not place you in a leadership position. In fact, you'll have a team leader, a department leader, and so on. So how can you use that knowledge when you're just starting out on this path?

It's about individual management at the onset and simply learning from experienced managers. Then it's about combining your studies with the actual workplace and building your own interpretation. Yet even with the example above, it still seems as if there are enough similarities to make it efficient.

What happens when it’s completely out of sync

Let's head back to the literature example or any type of arts background. Then take those studies and head into a management consultancy role. You may think you don't have the appropriate skills, but it depends on how you use them. Those degrees help expand your historical knowledge as well as invoke critical thinking on the meanings behind older works. This easily transposes into the critical thinking required for consultancies that need to look at a problem in a different light.

In the end

Of course, these are high-level examples, and there are various layers to them but don't ever think that if you want to change your mind at any point in your career, you may have had the wrong type of schooling to get you there. In fact, many companies like to look for as varied a pool as possible, so they do not get the same type of thinking and can take these different viewpoints.

This helps companies to stay agile, relevant, and beat out the competition. In fact, at times, having a varied background between scholastic achievement and career path could be the one distinguishing factor that can help you have a well-rounded and successful career down the line.

Of course, there'll be plenty of those that sync up their education with their job, so there's no worry about keeping the core functionality going, but that doesn't have to be everyone, and in fact, it is better for when it isn't.

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