Hi,
I am currently in IT but my eyesight is worsening every year so I am forced to switch majors. I want a major with a lot of job opennings so I won’t have trouble finding a job to provide for family upon getting BS
Thanks
Computers, unfortunately for you, are used in pretty much every single career out there. Even careers that you would think are mostly working with people - think health professionals, field researchers, environmentalists, etc. - use computers a lot - for research, for record-keeping, for data analysis. Still, IT workers probably use them more than most ![]()
The tl;dr version of this is that majors with quantitative skills and/or pre-professional tracks have some of the lowest recent college unemployment rates. Examples are finance, math, elementary education, nursing, electrical engineering, family and consumer sciences, chemistry, journalism, advertising, and marketing. The unemployment rates for undergraduate physics majors is not reported, but given their experienced college graduate rates and extrapolating from their skill set, I’d imagine their unemployment rate is low, too.
The thing to remember, though, is that majors, strictly speaking, are not what produces “lots of job openings.” Skills do. Majors that have good prospects on the job market are majors that teach the skills that employers demand. Theoretically, you could major in English but learn how to program elegantly and about software architecture and have a career as a software developer. Obviously, it’s easier to do that if you major in a specific field, but not necessary.
Another thing to remember is that these figures are from recent college graduates - people with less than 5 years of post-college experience in the workforce. After 5 years, unemployment rates tend to even out across fields and the unemployment rate for almost every field is between 4 and 7 percent (except the health professions, where rates are even lower).
And the third thing to remember is that employment =/= high salaries. For example, computer science is really in the middle of the pack, with unemployment rates that hover around 7-8% - not a whole lot better than social work, sociology, or psychology, and worse than chemistry. But a computer science major WITH a job in that field makes more money on average than any of those majors. Conversely, elementary education majors have low unemployment rates but also low salaries both early and mid-career.
The jobs in that list with the lowest unemployment but also best salaries - either short or long-term - are probably finance, math, nursing, electrical engineering, possibly chemistry, and advertising/marketing.
Source: https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/HardTimes2015-Report.pdf