After you graduate from university you’re faced with a decision. Do you go out to the working world or do you do a Masters. Many of these decisions depend on a variety of factors from the financial ability to continue on studying a Masters to even the conditions of the job market.
Here are the reasons on why you might want to do a Masters after your Undergrad:
1) Out of interest and expanding knowledge.
Perhaps there is a new field that you want to learn more about.
2) You happen to graduate at a time where it’s not a good time to find a job.
The economy may not be doing so well and people are retrenching. Doing a masters buys you time to enter the job market at a better time and potentially get a better job.
3) The field you want to go into requires some educational background in it
and you studied something completely different.
Amongst all these reasons to do a Masters, the conventional wisdom is that if you do a Masters, you’ll be able to command a higher pay when you graduate. That employers will value you at a premium.
In my experience though that part isn’t necessarily true. Yes employers would might value you more than another undergraduate but don’t forget you have to compare yourself with your peers ie people who graduated the same time you did.
Employers tend to value work experience more than they do Masters. I have a friend who graduated and decided to do a Masters. By the time he was out he went to work for a bank and reported to a uni mate of his. His uni mate was effectively his boss in the working world.The difference was that his uni mate went straight to work after graduating whereas my friend continued on with a Masters.
As an employer now I find myself feeling the same way. When you hire someone with 1 year work experience you’re paying for whatever that person has learned in that 1 year in a tough working world. That person not just knows more about the job or the industry, he or she has built some networks and has had experience working in a team.
Some employers might value someone with a Masters a little more than someone without however even then the premium you command will unlikely be significantly more than the tuition fees (or other expenses) you paid for doing that Masters.
One of my board members and investors in Netccentric is Kevin Tsai. When he graduated high school his father (who’s a successful billionaire in Taiwan) decided that instead of going to college he would learn more spending those years working in the business. That seems to have paid of. Today Kevin is one of the sharpest business minded people I know.
I’m not sure if I have it in me to tell my son not to go to college but I know that I’ll probably discourage him from doing a Masters unless he really really wants to (perhaps out of his own interest).
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space