Wrong Major? No Worries. The Tech Sector Still Wants You.

A list of 10 college majors with the best career prospects, published recently on CNBC.com, includes computer science, business, accounting, nursing, and others. It’s an interesting list, but don’t take it too seriously. From our partnerships with Fortune 500 companies, we’ve learned that degrees are not destiny, at least when it comes to technology careers.

In other words, don’t panic. If you’re a recent graduate whose major isn’t on the list, there are still plenty of reasons you can pursue a technology career. Here are four:

Firms Need Skilled Workers

The demand for skilled workers in technology jobs drives hiring, not the availability of specific majors. And that demand is extremely strong and still growing. In this environment, enterprise organizations cannot afford to limit their talent pools to certain majors. They’d be ceding a significant competitive advantage. The result? So long as you have the aptitude and willingness to perform the work and pursue a technology career, there’s a place for you.

A Major Isn’t Job Training

No matter how intensive your studies or in-depth your internships, college is fundamentally different from beginning a career. Your actual immersion into the workforce will take time and require additional training. At the very least, you’ll have to be taught the nuances of the industry you enter. Additionally, you might need to learn specific programming languages or other information technology skills. Because you’ll need this training regardless of your major, the most important skill you learn in college is how to think critically and solve problems.

Diversity of Thought Matters

Speaking of problem-solving, enterprise companies don’t want technology teams with the same backgrounds. They want to promote innovation, which requires cultures that prize ‘diversity of thought.’ The idea is that different majors teach different ways to approach problems. Entering a technology career with a degree other than computer science can be an asset.

Long-Term, Soft Skills Matter Most

Technical skills could help you land a job, but you need soft skills to have a technology career. Your major is unrelated to how well you work one-on-one or in groups. So if you excel at communicating and collaborating with others, employers will ultimately compete for you.

We Bridge the Skills Gap

At Revature, we recruit and prepare talented graduates for technology careers, regardless of their major. We recognized before most that someone needed to bridge the skills gap and help enterprise organizations fully staff their technology departments.

We pay for our engineers to go through intensive and customized 12-week training, where you’ll learn and practice hard and soft skills. By the time you finish, you’ll have a feel for the real-world, enterprise-level environment in which software engineers work. When your training is complete, we’ll place you in a job with one of our many clients.