Why do people study at graduate level?
Completing a course of graduate study is a challenging and exciting experience, which confers skills, experience and a sense of achievement valued by employers and students.
People study for graduate degrees for a variety of reasons.
- studying your degree subject in greater depth
- enhancing your job prospects in your chosen career
- retraining in a different area
- taking a postgraduate qualification as the next step in your career, for example in law, or education.
For the above reasons the graduate degree experience enhances a person's personal development and experience. It also provides a range of skills and expertise in a subject area that is transferable across a broad range of careers and life settings.
Employers, commenting in a recent university survey on those who have completed graduate degree courses and worked for them made the following declarations:
- I would have thought that the extra years of experience would have enabled them to develop a whole raft of higher-level skills.
- I tend to think of PhD students as more worldly wise and would expect to be getting additional maturity when we recruit them.
- I would welcome more applications from PhD students. I think the organisation needs their qualities.
- The fact that someone has done research can show enthusiasm, dedication and focus. Additional maturity can bring with it a better work ethic and more organisational loyalty.
- We see PhD students as having a wider range of skills to offer - analytical and numeracy amongst others
. - Postgraduate students have analytical skills, find new solutions to problems and are open to new ideas, these are very important skills.
