Economics as a discipline is highly regarded throughout the world, as it opens the door for a lot of different career paths; however, for a fresh economics graduate, navigating the job market can appear to be quite challenging, with a myriad of options being open and, at the same time, with information asymmetry about the job market conditions. However, for the well-informed and well-networked, economics can be a great discipline that would open the door to a lot of jobs.
In the context of Bangladesh, economics graduates mostly work in a few arenas, which include but are not limited to finance and banking, corporations, policy research, the development sector, market research, and academia. A few of those fields are intertwined with each other as well; for example, policy research and academia have a lot of intersection points. Hence, to get into any of these fields, an economics graduate needs to have an understanding of the niche that attracts them the most, and the decision has to be taken in the third or fourth year of undergraduate studies, as this is the most critical time for a person to decide his career.
Iftekharul Islam, an economics graduate from the University of Dhaka, who is currently working for a reputed think tank, said, "I was not sure which field I wanted to work in, but I was split between policy research and academia; however, in my fourth year at university, I realised that policy advocacy is my forte, hence I tried developing skill sets pertaining to that, including being proficient in statistical software such as STATA and R, and landed my first job being a master's student."
Iftekhar's advice to the new graduates who are willing to get into research and academia is to get a strong grasp of the subject materials rather than studying them to pass the exams. He also added that getting used to the computational applications of quantitative courses is essential, because otherwise in research, one would not be able to apply their learnings. He also added that it is important to decide what field one wants to move to in their junior and senior years of undergraduate.
Tasnim bin Alam, an economics graduate working for a reputed MFS (mobile financial services) company, had a lot of insights to share for economics graduates willing to enter the arena of the corporate sector. He said that for penetrating into the corporate sphere, the best possible way is getting hands-on experience and doing an internship right after graduation in a top corporate organisation. He added that the practical worksphere in a corporate organisation is often quite different from what people perceive it to be; hence there is no alternative to getting first hand exposure.
For banking and government jobs, the dimension is a bit different. Prince Ahmed (pseudonym), a graduate in economics working as an MTO (management trainee officer) for a renowned private commercial bank, said, "I was simultaneously preparing for banks as well as government 9th-grade jobs since there is a lot of intersection when it comes to the syllabus for these examinations. I initially didn't have a plan to join a bank, but since a good opportunity came my way, I didn't let it go."
He advised the fresh economics graduates who want to pursue a career to remain steadfast to their goal and follow the question patterns of the banks and also added that getting into banks has a lot to do with the basics of the graduates, since a lot of questions might appear to be intuitive.
Economics as a discipline opens the door to a lot of different fields right after graduation. However, a decision has to be made beforehand regarding which field one wants to pursue their career in.
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