Graduate Matchmaking - Which Degrees Transfer Well to Your Industry

The end of the academic year is a great time to give your business a boost. Once their degrees are complete, a sudden surge of graduates flood the job market. As a business, offering graduate opportunities is a great way to attract some of the best new talent.

Even if they haven’t completed a graduate internship and don’t have a few years’ experience under their belt, graduates can add value to your business. There are many benefits that come with hiring the right one. Not only can it be cost effective, they will bring a sense of eagerness and ambition to their role, and as something of a blank slate, can be moulded to take on your company’s values.

Every degree equips graduates with a range of transferable skills that can easily be applied to almost any organisation. However, some are more relevant to certain industries than others. It’s important to hire the right graduate from the right background for your business.

Important Graduate Degrees for Business

When looking to fill graduate roles and integrate new recruits into your team, organisations can find top-level candidates from many specialised backgrounds – including ones that may not instantly seem relevant. By simply glancing over a drama student’s application, hiring managers could potentially overlook their future leader.

Here are some of the most popular and important degrees¹ that produce potential employees with transferrable skills, suitable to fill many graduate roles.

Business

It might seem obvious, but business students offer a rounded skill set. Not only are they trained to find solutions and discover new opportunities, business graduates are also confident presenters and talented communicators. These professional attributes are well aligned to a variety of roles that are client-facing, including those revolving around sales.

Biological Sciences

While not an obvious business-minded study route, biological science graduates bring their own niche skills to a plethora of industries. Often graduates from this background are adept at project management, have a keen eye for data analysis and are renowned problem solvers. Biological science graduates are perfectly suited to roles within education and health and social work, with the potential to work their way up the professional ladder to management level in an operational role.

Social Studies

Excellent communicators and successful networkers, social studies graduates can be the ones who later become the best managers in business. Many tend to break into community work or the civil service, but there are a lot of graduate opportunities within sales thanks to these transferrable skills. As they can effectively communicate and analyse social situations, these are graduates who are well prepared for working towards the goals of any organisation.

Creative Arts and Design

Hiring managers can be forgiven for thinking creative arts and design graduates are more visually minded, but the skills they develop during their higher-level education expands beyond that. These graduates are trained to be highly organised and self-disciplined in their own work, which often increases their self-confidence – a sought-after personality trait in any employee.

When branching into the professional world, these graduates are often drawn to roles in marketing and design and can bring fresh and exciting ideas to all sorts of projects and work.

Computer Sciences and IT

All businesses need IT literate and computer minded professionals to keep their organisation running, so computer sciences and IT graduates are always worth looking out for. When considering applicants for IT related graduate roles, it’s important to choose a candidate with top level analytical skills, great attention to detail and with confidence in their research.

Having trained in these areas throughout their education, computer science and IT graduates should be at the top of the pile when looking to fill these roles.

No matter what educational background they’re from, many graduates have exceptional transferable skills that suit a range of industries. Pareto can help your organisation uncover its next business leaders by assisting with graduate job searches and finding candidates of the highest calibre with the potential to grow your business.

Yes, I want to hire the best sales talent

¹https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/least-and-most-popular-undergraduate-courses-uk