IS it possible to make yourself recession-proof? In the middle of a downturn it is very easy to feel the pressure as you imagine the consequences of the educational and career choices you are making. What will the employment situation of my specialism be like in 18 months or two years' time? Will my Master's degree be valuable to employers? Will it deliver me into a growing area, or into an industry experiencing troubled times? “Yes, it is very much possible to make yourself recession-proof,” says Mayukh Debnath, who originally did a Bachelor's of Engineering in Electronics and Communications and who is about to study for an MBA in the US. “The answer is that you are constantly updating your knowledge to what the industry wants and, if you are competent enough, there is no dearth of opportunities. During recession, maybe you can rethink of advancing your degree, or taking the right certification courses which may enhance your job prospects or make you more valuable to your existing company.” The first thing to say of course is that you are the person who needs to become the expert on what your Masters can do for your career. Everyone else involved in the transaction will get paid anyway, from the director of studies to the professors to the course brochure writers to the institution's careers advisors, regardless of whether the program delivers you into the job you want. You are the only one taking the risk so you need to do as much research as you can about the potential rewards. Particularly in a recession, if you want to understand the rewards of a Master's degree in terms of employability, you need to look at the situation from a different point of view. Essentially, you should be asking yourself the following question: what is the problem that my Master's degree will help me to solve? This question works at every level. If you are replying to a job advert in an SME, the problem you are expected to solve will be in the job description. If you are applying to a corporation, the problem you are solving is really one of talent supply. Do you look like a future manager or leader within that organization? Ultimately, as an entry-level graduate recruit, you are there to demonstrate that human resources knows what it is doing. However, the same question – “What is the problem that my master's degree will help me to solve?” – works just as well if you are looking to get into a career that is recession-proof. Place yourself at the centre of one of the world's great challenges and you can be pretty certain you will be joining a growing industry. Three of the greatest challenges at the moment are demographic change, technical change and climate change, so industries which confront these problems are among the most likely to remain recession proof. Demographic change: Healthcare It is no accident that healthcare is mentioned so often as one sector that has bucked the recession. People are living longer all over the world and everyone naturally wants the highest standards of healthcare for themselves and their families. Entering the healthcare industry in any one of a wide range of capacities, as a clinician, researcher or service provider, therefore looks like a very good bet. Demographic change: Energy production and supply Food production and water management are another two examples of industries affected by demographic change, this time in the form of population growth. Another example is energy production and supply. As the global population grows, ages and increases its income, there is going to be much greater demand for energy. Producing and supplying that energy cheaply, reliably and cleanly is bound to offer expanding opportunities, particularly as we can only now manage to do two out of three at any time (wind is clean and cheap but not reliable; nuclear energy is cheap and reliable but not clean). Technical change: Communications – lights on but nobody home? You can have as many means of communication as you like but you still have to have something to communicate. More people with access to faster broadband and greater amounts of leisure time is going to lead to a boom in the creative industries. At the moment, everyone is still experimenting with new types of content-creation business models for a world in which everyone can broadcast anything to everyone else at any time. However, what is certain is that this is going to lead to lots of opportunities for creating content on behalf of consumers and businesses (as every organization now needs professional levels of communication in the same way that businesses need professional accountants). Technical change “A number of sectors are taking the lead out of the recession, particularly technology-driven sectors such as internet, media, e-commerce, hardware and software manufacturing, and telecoms,” says Jurek Sikorski, Associate Director in London Business School's Careers Service with responsibility for Business Development (Healthcare and Technology). Again, it is no surprise that technological companies are bucking the recession. The pace of change continues to increase and there are plenty of new areas such as nanotechnology, synthetic genetics and free-space optics (in which broadband is delivered through light) offering new worlds to explore.Climate change “During these difficult times, finding a new driver of our economy is going to be critical,” said Professor Javier Carrillo, Executive Director of the Centre for Eco-Intelligent Management at IE Business School in Madrid in early 2009. “I think that that the environmental challenge will definitely provide a strategic direction to industry.” Although last year's Copenhagen Conference disappointed because of its failure to set a policy framework for action on climate change, tackling climate change is going to create demand for new skills and the support services that go with them. It may be a truism but there is a future in green industries such as carbon capture and storage, manufacturing hydrogen fuel-cells, biofuels, recycling resources, and in the re-engineering of the energy performance of existing buildings, systems and infrastructure. How to recession-proof yourself Whatever industry you go into however, the best thing you can do is to recession-proof yourself by thinking ahead and asking yourself the question “What is the next problem I am going to solve?” “Even during these lean periods, the market does not disappear completely, it just shrinks,” says Kaushik Srinivas, a Senior Software Engineer at Sterling Commerce which is part of AT&T who is about to pursue a master's in the USA. “So, to use a cliché, if you're the best in the industry, and are good at what you do, you will almost always be in demand, thus making your career recession-proof.” David Williams is a specialist in Graduate and Business Education choices and a regular contributor to topmba.com
