FUTURE OF WORK

By Ric @ Jobric · July 2026

"So what can you do with a [major]?"

Everyone who picked a major that isn't pre-law, pre-med, or engineering has heard some version of that question, usually from a relative at a holiday dinner who genuinely wants to know if you'll be okay. The question assumes there's one answer. One lane. Your degree is the door, and it opens onto exactly one hallway.

That's not how the market actually reads you. It doesn't scan for your major. It scans for what you can do. And what you can do, if you actually list it out, usually opens onto more doors than the careers office ever mentioned.

I'm not going to sugarcoat the part that's genuinely hard, because you'll trust the rest of this more if I don't.

Entry-level postings are down roughly 35% since January 2023, per labor-data firm Revelio Labs. Roughly 41.5% of recent grads are underemployed, working jobs that didn't require the degree they earned, per the most recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York data. That's real. If it feels harder than it should be, that's because it is harder than it should be.

Here's where I'll push back on the tidiest version of the story, because it's currently contested and you deserve the honest version. The popular explanation is "AI ate the entry level." A recent paper out of LSE, by researchers Peter John Lambert and Yannick Schindler, argues the timing lines up much better with the shift to remote work than with AI adoption specifically. Separate analysis from the New York Fed points the same direction. Nobody's claiming AI has zero effect. What's genuinely unsettled is how much of the damage is AI versus a labor market still absorbing a permanent shift in where work happens.

And there's a real, if modest, bright spot: NACE's spring update revised projected Class-of-2026 hiring up to about +5.6%, a sharp jump from the 1.6% projected back in fall 2025. That's a small, self-reported survey, not a government dataset, so hold it loosely. But the door isn't nailed shut. It's narrower. Narrower is a different problem than closed, and it changes what the right move is.

Here's the part that changes the math in your favor.

Look at what listings actually ask for, across roles, across industries, and the pattern isn't a specific major. It's a short list of portable skills that show up everywhere: communication skills appear in the majority of listings, spreadsheet and reporting tools like Excel aren't far behind, and project management shows up as a named requirement in a meaningful slice of postings that have nothing to do with "project manager" as a title. Layer in a few higher-value specialties, things like product strategy, compliance frameworks, or cloud fundamentals, and you start seeing roles that never once mention your major but absolutely reward what your major taught you how to do.

This is the part career advice tends to skip. Nobody tells you that your degree was never a single door. It was a hallway lined with several doors, and most of them are simply unlabeled.

A few of the non-obvious paths worth naming, illustrative rather than a promise, because your specific mix of coursework and experience will land differently:

A nursing student doesn't just qualify for bedside roles. The same training, systems thinking, patient documentation, care coordination, also points toward care management and even instructional design roles that need someone who's actually run a process under pressure.

An accounting major isn't boxed into a ledger. The rigor, the attention to controls, the comfort auditing a process for where it breaks, reads as a legitimate starting point for cybersecurity risk and compliance roles that most accounting students never think to apply to.

Neither of those is "your degree doesn't matter, apply anywhere." It's the opposite. Your degree taught you specific, transferable things. The job is figuring out which unlabeled doors those things actually open.

This is exactly what Jobric's skills-adjacency matching is built to surface. Instead of searching by job title, and instead of you having to guess which unlabeled doors your specific background opens, the system reads what you can actually do and scores you against roles that reward it, including the ones that never would have shown up in a title search.

And if you're genuinely torn between two directions, the traditional path in your field versus the adjacent one you're curious about, Focus Lens lets you run both as separate profiles at once. You don't have to pick a hallway before you've seen what's down it.

Your major was never the whole answer to "what can you do with it." It was the start of a longer list than anyone gave you credit for.

Explore your paths free on Seeker. It's a real plan, not a trial, and it costs you nothing to see which doors were actually there all along.

The next issue picks up where this one leaves off. Until then, the hallway's longer than you think.

That's the update. Now go do something that isn't job searching.

Ric @ Jobric