Will a university degree make you earn more? Probably but it depends on the university and the course.
Will it make you more attractive to employers? Quite likely: It shows you persisted for 3 years and met a standard, however irrelevant to their business.
Within the marketing and creative sectors there is no one size fits all. And generally in-house recruitment teams look for more traditional academic backgrounds than creative agencies. Not all of them but that’s a rough guide. Within agencies we have far more graduates with degrees in Business, Marketing, Advertising, PR and of course the much maligned Media Studies. It is by no means essential. In the last month I have also placed graduates with degrees in Classics, History and Forensic Science. We have seen some evidence of apprenticeships which may be applied for with A-levels but they generally seem to be the larger network agencies.
Anyway. The reason I thought I’d write about graduates was because there was a recent survey from PwC: a big graduate employer. Alongside the question of which degrees bring highest earnings, it also asked which produced the greatest life satisfaction afterwards. It made for interesting reading.
Graduates of medicine, dentistry and pharmacology both had high earnings and high life satisfaction. But high salary and high satisfaction did not always correlate - Sports Science won’t earn you a fortune but living in a physical world and being active brings joy. Pharmacologists are also twice as happy as Chemists (I was a Chemist!). Equally, high earning physics and astronomy graduates are as glum as those who studied media and who apparently earn peanuts!
The big surprise was that graduates of Celtic Studies are the happiest of all - I wondered if this was some kind of anomaly but apparently not. It doesn’t pay well but I’d imagine that if you were applying for a degree in Celtic Studies you might already know that and you’d be genuinely passionate about the subject rather than looking for it to be a route to a highly paid career.
Sadly, the creative subjects (Media and Comms and Creative Arts) produced the lowest scores for both life satisfaction and earnings. I’ve always acknowledged that marketing and the creative sector is not as high earning as some of the major professions (think law, accountancy, medicine) but they’re not terrible. I do however see quite a few people leaving the industry each year which perhaps might support the low life satisfaction score. Often the sector is great for employees when you’re in your twenties and early thirties working and playing hard. But it’s a lot harder for working parents as lots of the independent agencies have been slower to get up to speed on improving flexible work conditions. I also think that salaries are lower than many other professions but it’s the benefits that are also less inclusive. The contributions to pensions are lower than many sectors with the majority of agencies going for the minimum 3% mandatory contribution from the employer. Healthcare provision is still not widely available and increasingly this is on the radar of employees given the difficulties in the NHS.
So, employers really need to work on employee wellbeing and happiness in order to retain them. Some of the big network agencies in the North are attracting an increasing number of employees with their benefit packages. One network does offer an 11% contributory pension - previously unheard of!
Recruitment wasn’t up there as it’s (obviously) not a graduate subject. However, as someone who came from Chemistry through to Marketing and then ended up in Recruitment I can honestly say that it should score well on salary and life satisfaction. That might be because I work for myself though!