Best Jobs for Business Students
What are the top career options for business majors?
Career Options
If you have a business major this article will help you decide which career path might suit you best. Though, this guide also applies to overlapping majors such as finance, economics, and management.
This article will focus on the early stages of the career, from internships to your first couple years of work. The 5 options that we will explore are:
- Management Consulting
- Investment Banking
- Big Tech
- Accounting
- Entrepreneurship
Each career will be ranked by difficulty of getting into the job, work hours and pay to provide you with an easy breakdown to weigh up each option. The guide will also provide examples of companies for each career path and potential exit opportunities.
Bear in mind that these suggestions are rather number-oriented, if you’re a more creative person with a business major, perhaps look to careers in marketing, sales and HR.
Video Breakdown: Best Jobs for Business Students
Are you more of a visual learner? If so, consider checking out our video guide on 5 popular career options for business students featuring salary expectations, recruitment difficulty, and work hours.
#1 Management Consulting
As a management consultant you help companies improve their performance in exchange for a fee. Essentially, it’s pure problem solving for businesses.
Example day-to-day tasks: Researching if it’s worth entering into the electric vehicle market as a traditional car company, investigating compensation scheme improvements to improve employee motivation and work output, etc.
Work/ Life Balance:
Expect long hours with significant amounts of travel time. A rough estimate is around 70 hours per week. Consultants often spend half the week at a hotel working for a client. Although COVID has fueled more remote work, travel still remains part of the culture.
Pay:
This will vary greatly by location. Typically, a fresh out of college position at a top consulting firm in one of the big business hubs like NYC or Chicago can earn around $110,000+.
Compensation Breakdown Estimate
- $90,000 Base Salary
- $5,000 Signing Bonus
- $15,000 Performance Bonus
Please note that the USA pays considerably more than other countries, for example a UK consultant makes on average £46,000 (around $65,000), although the cost of living, tax, and other factors should be considered.
Difficulty:
Getting a position in the top management consulting firms is extremely difficult. Whilst they don’t disclose acceptance rates, it is likely to be lower than 5%. Acceptance rates may be more favorable in non-English speaking countries where there is a smaller pool of bilingual candidates.
Management Consulting is a popular career choice amongst students as it opens a lot of doors due to its broad nature, prestige, and high salaries. Thus, when pursuing this path, it is important to prepare extensively for the recruitment process.
Check out this free guide which gives a breakdown of all the necessary steps.
Afterwards:
Management consultants are highly prized because they have seen a whole range of different situations. This should give them a wide range of exit opportunities. Despite not having focused on one particular area, in theory management consultants are very good at solving problems, giving them a fair amount of leverage when choosing their next career.
Companies:
The most notorious management consulting firms are McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain & Company (also known as the Big Three or MBB). These three are the most prestigious, but some others include Oliver Wyman, Kearney, and the Big 4 (PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, EY).
Career Summary
- Work-Life Balance: 2/5
- Pay: 4/5
- Difficulty: 5/5
- Overall Rating: 4/5
- Total Compensation: $110,000
- Working Weeks: 50
- Hours/Week: 70
- Total/Hours: $31
#2 Investment Banking
Investment banking is made up of two sides: financing and advisory. Financing involves helping clients, which are mainly companies and governments, raise money. Whilst advisory involves advising companies on what they should do with their money. This is a very simple definition but check out the Career Principles YouTube Channel for a more detailed video on the differences between Investment and Commercial banking.
Work/ Life Balance:
It’s well known that investment bankers work long hours. On average it’s about 80 hours a week for employees the first or second year out of college. It is also common for junior people to work weekends as these hours are fairly widespread across the industry, whether at a bulge bracket or boutique investment bank.
Pay:
The salary tends to be very high, hence the trade-off with the long work hours. In the USA, a starting level job can get you around $135,000.
Compensation Breakdown Estimate
- $85,000 Base Salary
- $50,000 Annual Bonus
- $135,000 Total Compensation
$135,000 is big for a first year, however, in relative terms, taking into account the hours worked, it’s not as generous as it seems.
Difficulty:
Investment Banking is an extremely competitive career to get into, you need to build up your CV, your skill set and go through an intensive recruitment process. Goldman Sachs has an acceptance rate of 3%, and other banks are similarly around 3-5%.
Afterwards:
Due to the intensive long hours, investment bankers tend to move on from the job within 1-3 years of starting. Overall, investment bankers are well regarded as they’re financially literate and work hard.
There are two paths that are the most common for them to take.
- Private equity. This is basically going to work for a fund that manages money.
- Corporate development. This is the department in a company that is responsible for executing mergers, acquisitions and raising money for a corporation.
Companies:
The most renowned banks are the bulge brackets (essentially the biggest investment banks out there). These include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America and about five more. There are also boutique investment banks, which are smaller, but more specialized like Centerview, Lazard and Evercore.
Career Summary
- Work-Life Balance: 1/5
- Pay: 5/5
- Difficulty: 5/5
- Overall Rating: 5/5
- Total Compensation: $145,000
- Working Weeks: 50
- Hours/Week: 80
- Total/Hours: $36
#3 Big Tech
Business students will likely be on the business side of tech companies, as it’s unlikely you’ll be a software engineer. The business side encompasses areas such as business development, finance, and marketing. These include things like ads on social media sites, account management for suppliers of Amazon products, and finance and accounting for these companies.
Work/ Life Balance:
Work life balance in tech is normally fairly decent. Generally, it is around 40 to 60 hours per week, and no weekend work. Typically, there is no dress code, pretty cool offices, some offer free food and remote work.
Pay:
The pay package in tech is a little confusing. Typically, it consists of a base salary, a signing bonus, and a “share package”. Here is compensation breakdown for typical employee in the USA.
Compensation Breakdown Estimate
- $80,000 Base Salary
- $25,000 Signing Bonus (Split over two years)
- $50,000 Stock Bonus
You should note that stock compensation often fluctuates in value, but at the time of signing the value of those shares are typically around $50,000.
These kinds of stock bonuses will have a vesting period. This means that they’re not yours until you’ve spent a certain number of years at the company. For example, you could receive 10% of the shares after one year, 20% after two years, 30% after three years and the remaining 40% after 4 years.
Difficulty:
It’s well known that for software engineering, big tech is extremely difficult to get into. However, for the business-oriented roles, there isn’t much data on acceptance rates. The interviews in tech tend to be quite difficulty, especially the case-based ones. Other than that, there isn’t much information, as tech firms are still very much expanding, unlike consulting or banking which are relatively stable industries. With this in mind, more jobs in tech are bound to be created.
Afterwards:
Employees on the business side of tech tend to stick around longer than in banking or consulting. This is because the work-life balance is healthy, and there are many opportunities within the company as tech firms are only growing, also compensation through shares create an incentive to stay. If you do move on, there are many other tech firms and growing startups to consider.
Companies:
The big 5 are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. However, there’s obviously many other companies that you probably use in your day to day like PayPal, Netflix, or Spotify.
Career Summary
- Work-Life Balance: 5/5
- Pay: 4/5
- Difficulty: 3/5
- Overall Rating: 5/5
- Total Compensation: $100,000
- Working Weeks: 50
- Hours/Week: 50
- Total/Hours: $40
#4 Accounting
Accounting is basically the way a business maintains accurate records of their financial position. Doing this allows for questions such as “how much did we sell today?”, “how much is the payroll this month?”, and “are we growing?”.
Typically, the role consists of spending a couple of weeks to months at a client company, looking over their accounts and verifying them, which is known as auditing. An accountant constantly liaises with the companies accounting and finance team asking for information, so that they can produce an audit report.
Work/ Life Balance:
Work hours for accounting tend to be similar to those in Big Tech, so around 40 to 60 hours per week. This does depend on the season, as January to March tend to be quite busy for accountants as most companies close their accounts at year end. The job also entails a fair amount of traveling, as you spend time at the client’s office.
Pay:
The salary tends to be around $60,000 per year, for the big business cities in the USA. This may also include a bonus of about $5,000 at the end of the year, depending on performance.
Difficulty:
Generally, accounting is not as competitive a career choice as investment banking or management consulting. This is primarily because it is often seen as a relatively boring career option (although this is not necessarily correct and is up to individual preferences!).
Also, since there tend to be accounting firms in every sizeable city in the world, it’s not as competitive, provided you have a degree and decent grades.
Afterwards:
If you’ve worked as an accountant, it’s likely you would have needed to get a qualification such as the Certified Public Accountant (CPA, in the USA). This will give you some value in the business world, as you’re qualified to do accounting and should put you in good stead for other jobs further down the line.
Companies:
The Big 4, (Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG) are among the biggest accounting firms with offices around the world, and between 2-300,000 employees each (although they also have consulting, legal and transaction services).
Career Summary
- Work-Life Balance: 4/5
- Pay: 3/5
- Difficulty: 2/5
- Overall Rating: 3/5
- Total Compensation: $65,000
- Working Weeks: 50
- Hours/Week: 50
- Total/Hours: $26
#5 Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is simply starting your own business with endless options and different sectors to start a company.
Work/ Life Balance:
It’s tricky to give a precise number on hours per week, as you dictate the work. Thus, you work as hard, and put in as many hours, as you want. Most founders have acknowledged that in the early years of a business they typically put in a lot of work, around 80 hours per week, for an extended period of time. If you don’t work, you won’t make money. In this sense, unlike a regular job, it can be a lot more stressful.
“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.” – Bill Gates
“Working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks in a year and people still call me lucky” – Elon Musk
Pay:
Again, pay is difficult to quantify for entrepreneurship. The harsh reality is that most businesses fail within a couple of years, however, on the flip side, when you look at the richest people in the world, the large majority of them made their wealth by starting their own company.
Difficulty:
To become an entrepreneur you don’t need anyone’s permission or to go through a recruitment process, you simply go ahead and start. Whether your business will succeed is another issue but starting one doesn’t have any barriers.
Companies:
There are countless examples of startups, some relatively new ones include DoorDash founded in 2013, WeWork in 2010 and RobinHood established in 2013.
Career Summary
- Work-Life Balance: 1/5
- Pay: 2/5
- Difficulty: 1/5
- Overall Rating: 2/5
- Total Compensation: N/A
- Working Weeks: 50-52
- Hours/Week: 80
- Total/Hours: N/A
Additional Resources
If you want to further develop your skills to be a stronger candidate for these business roles, take a look at our Excel for Business & Finance Course, our PowerPoint for Business & Finance Course, and more using the get started button below.
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