Which College Degrees & Skills Employers Covet

Garrett Weaver

IT 513: Writing and Critical Thinking for the IT Professional

Professor Lynne Williams

8/24/2015

The job market has fluctuated over the years based upon the economy. Recently, more and more college graduates are getting hired by highly respectable companies. National Associate of Colleges and Employers (NACE) conducted a survey which stated employers will hire 9.6% more college graduates for the U.S. workforce than the previous year (Adams, 2015). NACE is a non-profit group based out of Pennsylvania that surveyed more than one thousand companies. They received responses from 162 companies from all facets of the employment sector (Adams, 2015). The survey asked employers to rate the academic degrees they target for employee hires. The most coveted degree for employers is engineering with a seventy two percent hiring rate (Adams, 2015). Organizations look to hire graduates with a business degree at an astounding rate of sixty eight percent (Adams, 2015). The degrees that bring up the rear are humanities, health sciences, agriculture, and education. That shouldn’t warrant someone not going for a degree in that particular field. The same survey asked employers to rate the most coveted skill in newly hired employees. Critical thinking is the most coveted skill, followed by problem solving, working well in a team, and then proper professionalism and a strong work ethic (Adams, 2015). The least coveted skill is career management. No matter what, this survey says students who are avid about a particular field should pursue that degree, according to Dan Black the immediate past president of NACE’s board and leader of EY (Adams, 2015). EY is America’s largest recruiting for accounting and professional services (Adams, 2015). The college hiring process mirrors the economy,