UC Careers & Employment

UC Careers & Employment

What can I do with a Degree in Geography?

Introduction

Choosing a career involves more than just finding out what is open to you. Knowledge about yourself is central to the process. It is valuable to start by looking at your individual values, interests, and skills in order to relate career options to you. The suggestions here are only an aid to this decision-making process.

Most employers look for generic skills such as communication, interpersonal, customer-focus and the ability to work in and contribute to a team. Some of these are developed during your degree, whilst others have been developed through extra-curricular activity such as sports, community, or cultural groups.

As more and more employers are developing job titles that are particular to their own environment, it is more difficult to provide a definitive list of possible career options. The ones that follow should be considered to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.

What skills are developed?

Make no mistake, by studying for a degree in Geography at Canterbury you'll have been able to develop a plethora of skills – many of which will interest potential employers. The trick is to identify them; choose those which are particularly relevant to the career you seek; talk about them in applications and interviews and be able to provide evidence of where you developed them.

What, then, might some of those skills be? Well, you'll now have an enhanced ability to synthesise disparate types of information. You'll also have developed your numeracy and analysis skills and will be able to design and carry out research projects. Able to take the initiative, you'll be clear-headed, organised and a good communicator – both orally and in writing. Self-driven and self-motivated, you'll have the ability to conceive, carry out and complete work – not least the application of your knowledge to real-world situations and problems. Your degree was designed to be flexible and relevant and you'll have shown the ability to cope with such flexibility, not least by making informed and well-thought-out choices.

Ideally, your degree will mean that you take a holistic and integrated world view. In short, one where you understand and appreciate inter-personal relationships and the linkages between people and their environments. In addition, you'll also have a highly-developed sense of how such linkages and environments might be made more sustainable. Finally, amongst your broad ranging ‘disciplinary' skills will be your developed ability to adopt a scientific approach to analysing environmental variables. Within this will be an aptitude for connecting such variables.

Career options

It is important to appreciate that career opportunities in some areas, and in some roles are dependent not only on applicants having certain skills and/or knowledge, but also on personal qualities and attributes such as interpersonal and leadership potential. Such qualities and attributes can have a significant influence on the entry level into a company or organisation, or career progression within it.

Hopefully, you've taken a look at some of the skills which your course has given you the chance to develop. What of your career options though? As with your skills, these are many and varied.

Every year, significant numbers of Geography graduates enter career paths in the fields of planning, research and management. Others choose policy related work or enter environmental roles. You'll find geographers in career areas as diverse as tourism and computing, electronics and publishing. Of course, you'll also find them in teaching, lecturing and university research. For others, self-employment is the preferred option.

One choice that you'll have to make concerns the extent to which you want to use your subject on a day-to-day basis in your work. Many of the career options noted here will require you to do so – to greater or lesser extents. However, there are career areas where this will not be the case, or at least not to as large an extent. For example, Canterbury Geographers have found work in areas from Human Resource Management, through Police work to Pilot.

Types of employers

Many different types of employer recruit Geography graduates. Just as you have wide-ranging skills and diverse career options so, too, do you have a wealth of types of employer from which to choose. Any analysis of Canterbury Geography graduates – from the recent and the more distant past – will show them working for employers from the Treasury and local government, through GIS and GPS organisations to the New Zealand Tourism Board. For those employed in local government, and in private consultancy firms, a major avenue of employment is Resource Management. Others, in local and national government, work in policy analysis; policy development and planning roles – to name but some. International organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, offer an alternative employment sector for geographers.

The workplace of the early twenty-first century demands flexibility. Many people change job, and employer, a number of times in their working lives and there is increasing movement – particularly for Geographers – between the public and private sectors.

Where have graduates been employed?

2006 & 2007 graduate destination information for different subject areas and qualification levels is available via the New Zealand Vice Chancellors Committee website.

NZUniGradStats (published in June 2008) contains information on destinations and other outcomes from the annual survey of all graduates from the New Zealand university system.

UC Careers & Employment has free copies of NZUniGradStats and the graduate destinations information by subject.

For information on the destinations of Canterbury Geography graduates – some from the recent past and some from a number of years ago – see the department's website.

Further study

It is possible to study at post-graduate level in subjects both directly related and un-related to your degree. Related course of study include the Honours degree, and studies at Postgraduate Diploma, Masters and PhD level. This additional study can impact on your entry level of employment. Carefully consider your motivation for study, how it fits in with your long-term career plans and whether it is likely to enhance your employment prospects. Many Graduates do additional training in for example Teaching, Librarianship, Computing or Management. Others choose specialist training in areas of Geography including Climatology; Transport; GIS; Remote Sensing and Geomorphology.

How can I find out more?

This should have started your thinking about your future. To follow this up and find out more information on jobs of interest, visit Career Services.

Other useful links

If you are an intending or current student at the University of Canterbury, or a recent graduate, UC Careers & Employment offers a wide range of services, including individual career guidance, seminars and resource information.

In addition: