How to choose your studies? Strategies for a professional career

Academic and professional orientation is one of the subjects to be adressed of the Catalan education system. On the occasion of the Saló de l’Ensenyament, ​​U·TRANS has been working on a small research to guide the decision of what university degree to undertake depending on demand and employability.

Logically, these are the two key questions when choosing according to these criteria:
• It is preferable to opt for studies with a high degree of employability, since entering the labor market will be easier.
• It is preferable to opt for studies with low demand, since accessibility will be higher.

Degree of employability versus demand
On the basis of the most requested degrees in the admissions 2016-2017 process for public universities we have placed in the axis of the abscissa the employability of the students of the 2010 promotion (data of 2014) and in the axis of ordinates the applications in first preference with regard to the places offered.

Among the most popular studies we can observe that Medicine and Dentistry are those that present the highest degree of employability four years after their students finish the studies, with levels of labor insertion that exceed 95%, followed by other studies such as Business Administration and Advertising and Public Relation, that surpass the 90% of employability.

The demand for degrees having a high employability
In order to know which are the studies with the higher or lower level of demand among those who have the highest degree of labor insertion we repeated the procedure backwards using the same data. That is to say, on the basis of the degrees having the highest employability levels we analyzed whether they have many of few applications in the first instance by the future graduates.

In this case, we can see that the most demanded studies among those having an employability above 92% are Medicine, followed by Dentistry. Those data match with the previous chart. However, they are followed by studies such as Advertising and Public Relations, Mathematics, Logopedics and Translation & Interpretation.

Nevertheless, we can appreciate that those studies that have the best ratings on insertion, such as Occupational Therapy, do not cover all the vacancies. This is also the case of the Technical engineering in Computer Science, that has a degree of employability of 94,7% even so it just covers 38% of demand.