There’s no shortage of businessperson representation in pop culture. You have the fun-to-watch-but-terrible-to-work-for like Jack Donaghy or Miranda Priestly; the ruthless and legitimately concerning like Jordan Belfort or anyone on Succession; the actually relatable like Jim and Pam; and the “I feel deeply seen” like Vincent Adultman (the BoJack Horseman character who was actually three children in a trench coat pretending to “do a business”).
But outside of these extremes, there are also the characters (and maybe people in your own life) who reference their offscreen office, boss, and coworkers while wearing lots of blazers, solid-color button-down shirts, or suits. This vague “business” job has become almost a default when thinking about white-collar jobs.
So it’s no surprise that business is one of the most popular college majors in the country. (In fact, in the most recent year with available data, 11% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. colleges were in business.) But it’s also no surprise that you might have questions about what to do with your business degree. What can you do with it? Short answer: Almost anything.
People with business degrees “know how to build a business around their desired work,” says Arkadiusz Mironko, a management professor at Indiana University East’s School of Business and Economics who’s advised hundreds of students on their careers. So if you’re pursuing one, or are considering it, know that there are a number of jobs your major lays the groundwork for, including roles in finance, insurance, sales, marketing, HR, and tech. We’ve put together a list of nine jobs for those with business degrees as well as where people in these roles usually work, what skills and qualities they need, and how to get started.
Top skills business majors have
As a business student, you probably focused on a certain area like information systems or management (or maybe you majored in one of these areas at a business college). And you’ve likely come away with a number of soft and hard skills related to that concentration. However, no matter what your specialty, chances are you’ve also gained a few core skills that are highly transferable and valuable to employers across various industries at all types of companies.
- Flexibility: Business majors are “agile enough to be a chameleon,” says Muse coach Nadia Ibrahim-Taney M.Ed., MA, who's also a career coach and lecturer at the University of Cincinnati. Undergraduate business degrees teach you how business works and how to be a lifelong learner, making you flexible enough to go into any organization or corporate environment and adapt to it. The technology you learn in school “may not exist in 40 years,” Ibrahim says, but the ability to learn new things quickly will be valuable for your entire career.
- Communication and interpersonal skills: “Good business schools combine the technical and the humanistic,” Ibrahim-Taney says. Through your coursework, you learned just not what needs to be done, but how to work well with other people. You also learned the best ways to communicate verbally and in writing as well as how to give presentations on a variety of topics.
- Analytical skills: Whether you’re analyzing businesses or investments, writing case studies, or creating business plans, you can apply what you learned in school about how to evaluate a lot of information (both quantitative and qualitative) and use it to draw conclusions and solve problems.
Here are nine jobs to consider if you majored in business—that don’t require an MBA to get started.
