The job you never wanted but may have

When new freshman arrive at school, one conversation topic that always comes up is career plans. Soon, they realize that everyone seems to have their eyes on the same five or six careers. Maybe their new school is nothing but a factory for future doctors, lawyers, teachers, therapists and social workers after all. Who knew?

Now, skip ahead four years to graduation. Somehow, the circumstances have changed. The majority of students are graduating in something other than the major they originally chose. What happened?

The answer is multifaceted. Attrition and changing interests play a role. However the largest reason, according to experts at Ball State University, is due to “career possibilities” in the new field, while “many job openings” is the third biggest factor. Simply put, some career fields have too many applicants and not enough jobs, while in others the opportunities are endless.

Many of the careers most popular among freshmen, such as law, engineering and education are saturated with qualified competition but short on positions. You may ask yourselves then, which are the jobs with so many opportunities?

The answer is sales jobs. Currently, 4.5 million U.S. citizens are employed as some sort of sales representative, whether it’s of airplanes, insurance or hotdogs. That’s enough to make this the most common job nationwide. Closely related jobs, like cashier and customer service representative, are not far behind at second and seventh most common, respectively.

Regardless of how unpalatable we may find sales jobs, they’re everywhere. It’s true that services like healthcare, legal advice and education are necessary. However, most of all, the American consumer wants “things,” as evidenced by our economy being number one in the world for consumption of both durable and non-durable goods.

In addition to being a large sector of the economy, the future of sales jobs is very secure. Businesses contract their production to offshore firms with greater frequency all the time, but retail, incidentally, continues to be handled at home. To explain, I’ll simply say that we as Americans prefer handling the buying and selling aspects of business domestically. It’s obvious when you think about it: although Americans typically buy the cheapest good — which more often than not is produced in a foreign labor market — few of us would consider traveling to that foreign market to buy it. The resultant practice of importing these foreign goods to sell here is what assures sales jobs’ future in the U.S.

With such vast and guaranteed opportunities, perhaps sales isn’t as distasteful a career choice as freshmen may have thought.

— levi.henrie@aggiemail.usu.edu