Career Prep in College - What It Means and What It'll Do For You

Let’s look first at the career prep path.

What Is It?

Conceptually, the career prep path is simple: You focus your college experience on preparing for the career you want after graduation. Thus, your time in college becomes less about the experience itself and more about how it prepares you for your desired career. It’s often easy to identify majors that are designed for career prep, as the name of the major matches the name of the job: nursing for aspiring nurses, mechanical engineering for aspiring mechanical engineers, etc. But, the key factor is that the focus is on preparing for a specific career, not that the name of the major conforms to a pattern.

The Components of Career Prep

The career prep path usually prepares you for two distinct stages of your career: (i) getting the job, and (ii) doing the job. For clarity, let’s define some terms: Credentials are what help you get a job; competence is what helps you do the job. While there can be some overlap between these categories—for example, when potential employers use tests of competency as a form of credentials—they’re still useful for our purposes. Let’s explore them in more detail.

As I said, competence is what helps you do the job. It’s composed of the subject-matter knowledge and skills required to be a capable practitioner. Much of the competence you gain in college comes from the material you learn and the skills you build in classes. This includes what most people think of when they think of career prep in college: nursing majors learning anatomy, mechanical engineering majors learning physics. However, our concept of competence here also includes the soft skills: teamwork, responsibility, self-management, professional ethics, etc. It’s the combination of all these experiences and skills that (hopefully) give you the competence to be qualified to do the job.

In contrast, credentials are what you use to prove you can do the job. The easiest way to think about it is the “resume test”: If it’s main purpose is to be listed on your resume, it’s a credential. The most obvious credentials are degrees and occupational licenses, but many other activities associated with a college education—such as GPA, internships, and professor references—can serve as credentials as well. Since college is the sole way to obtain many of these essential credentials, the only practical path into some careers is to go to college and follow the career prep track. If you want to become a nurse or a mechanical engineer, you’re going to need to major in it.

In summary, credentials are how you signal you have the competence employers are looking for. To quote Economist Bryan Caplan in his book, The Case Against Education, “If you want the labor market to recognize your strengths, and most of the people with your strengths hold a credential, you’d better earn one too. Otherwise employers won’t take you seriously enough to give you a chance.” Once you get that chance, your competence is what will allow you to succeed in the job. So, both competence and credentials have value in the career prep track.

What Does It Offer?

The career prep path is designed to help you get a job after graduating. Of course, the key benefit is not just the ability to get a job, but the ability to get the job: The job you want enough to be willing to dedicate your education to preparing for it. Let’s discuss the advantages that can come with jobs like that.

Access to Gated Jobs

In highly regulated fields, career prep is often the only way to become legally qualified to do the work. I call jobs that require specific licenses “gated” because the credential requirements serve to set standards on who can access the jobs (just like a gate does for a road). If you want to be a professional civil engineer, for example, you’ll need a degree in civil engineering, no ifs, ands, or buts. It’s not uncommon for a professional license to require a specific type of degree, and thus there’s real value to using the career prep path in college to make sure you’re on track.

The obvious benefit of having access to gated jobs is that there will be a smaller pool of potential applicants to compete with. Only people with the proper credentials stand any chance of getting the job, which means you won’t have to compete with every random person that suddenly decides it’d be cool to work in your field. On the other hand, it also means you may find yourself not wanting to try out other career tracks since you’ve already invested so much in this one. Making matters worse, the credentials required for gated jobs usually don’t transfer well. Whereas competence (skills and knowledge) is often useful in many jobs outside of the one it was built for, credentials are narrow in scope. And that narrowness means that they can end up limiting the options available to you if you aren’t willing to start over from scratch.

So, getting the credentials for gated jobs can be like double-edged sword: They give you access to special opportunities, but they also come with built-in disincentives for exploring other job options. I think pursuing a gated career can be a solid choice (especially if they offer salary benefits, as we’ll discuss next), but it’s worth knowing the drawbacks, too.

Higher Salary, Sometimes

As we discussed above, career prep can open the door to gated jobs. These often pay better than average, so career prep is frequently considered to be the path to a higher salary. However, this isn’t always true. Education and chemical engineering are both pursued through the career prep track, yet the resulting careers—teacher and chemical engineer—are on opposite ends of the pay scale. Aspiring teachers probably aren’t in it for the money, but instead for the other benefits (job satisfaction, meaningful impact, etc.) So, while many gated careers can be lucrative, not all are.

Besides gated jobs, career prep can also help you get a higher salary by providing assurance to potential employers that you will be able to do the job (and do it well). Employers pay more for competent employees, especially if they feel they don’t have to worry about the possibility of a bad hire. Having a degree in a respected major from a reputable school reduces their worry about a bad hire, as do other types of credentials: a high GPA, previous work experience, etc. The career prep path can be a great way to acquire these comforting assets, giving you the competence to do the job and the credentials to prove it. And thus career prep can be a good way to increase your earning potential, even for non-gated jobs.

Early Start

For the most part, career prep provides its benefits early on in your career. Immediately after graduation, having valuable skills and credentials can give you access to jobs unavailable to the masses, and it can set you up on career tracks that others will struggle to follow without similar abilities/credentials.

As you progress through your career, though, continued success relies less on initial advantage and more on job performance. So, it’s worth noting the career prep path doesn’t guarantee a good job forever. It’s a reasonable method of getting a good start into a career, especially competitive or restrictive careers, but only continued hard work will let you maintain that advantage. There’s no free lunch.

The Case for Career Prep

While picking a career direction can be tough when your life experiences have been limited, not picking comes with its own set of disadvantages. The career prep path we’ve discussed here—pick a career to aim for, then choose the major that prepares you for that career—can be a great way to transform your career prospects from low-wage retail jobs to high-wage white collar work in the space of four years. And if you decide you want to change paths, some of the skills you learned along the way will likely prove relevant to other things you want to do anyway.

There’s a reason so many parents encourage their children to pursue “safe” careers: Parents can imagine all the ways their lives could have gone wrong, and they want to minimize the chances their children will face similar issues. There’s a little bit of parental overprotection-ism at play here, but it’s understandable and at least partially justified. The world isn’t an easy place. As an adult, you’ll be expected to support yourself by earning a living, and that probably means you’ll need to get a job. That’s why career prep is for the realists. If you want to start working toward a realistic life plan and build your own certainties, career prep might be right for you.