Why do a postgrad course?

Postgraduate Study and Training – Why?

The Information Age; The Learning Age; The Knowledge Economy; ‘Working Smarter’; Phrases for the 21st Century. What unites them is their implication that education has a key role in driving our society and our economy. And yet most of the literature written by Careers Services, like ours, on postgraduate study is shot through with cautions and caveats.

 

Why should this be so? And in particular why should this be so when we Careers Advisers, are all employed by Universities which naturally have a vested interest in marketing their programmes of study?

 

There are a number of reasons. One of them is that Careers Services are professionally committed to the needs and priorities of the student. Call us ‘old fashioned’, but we want you to win. Therefore we would like you to have the full facts before making decisions to enrol on postgraduate courses. Our Universities have marketing departments to persuade you to the particular benefits of particular courses, but that is their job not ours.

 

The second reason follows on from the first.  You need the full facts so that you can make an appropriate judgement about how you spend the next phase of your life.

 

Helping you in the making of that judgement is what we are interested in. Most professional Careers Advisers are committed to a notion that has come to be     known as ‘Career Management’. The more cynical of my student clients tend to dismiss the as some kind of corporate-speak. I do not think it is. It is about you using all the intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources you have to exercise some sort of control over your working life.

 

Career Management implies a conscious building up of skills and knowledge. Its aim is to make you more effective in your current role and also to prepare the ground for the transitions you will need to make as your career, your aspirations and your needs change.

Postgraduate study is potentially a powerful agent in your mastery of Career Management.

 

About 1 in 5 of UK university students do a course of further study in the year after graduation. Many more take up courses in the subsequent years. So why do they do it?

 

They feel it will improve their job prospects

 

Although this sounds common sense there is no data that I know of, that demonstrates that Masters students do better than honours graduates in terms of employment in the UK. It is true that in some European countries and in the United States there is a more developed sense of the employment value of masters level study – though in my view it relates more to vocationally focused courses in business, technology and social science. No, the value of a Masters is all about the value that the student places on it. It may about the depth of study, the focus or the opportunity to conduct a piece of extended research.