Dilemma - accept job offer or further studies
 

My current situation: local uni grad (second upper hons), regret choice of degree, employed in a horrible job I dread going to most days

Been job hunting for around 6 months plus, but little luck. So thought of going to do a Masters to open more options for myself and hopefully can enter a field I'm more interested in, as I have little passion for the industry related to my bachelors degree.

But earlier today I received a job offer where the job scope, environment and work-life balance is an improvement from my current job. Quite decent, but it's still something I'd be tolerating rather than enjoying. But now I'm wondering whether I should decline the offer and go study, so that in the long term I have the chance to be more fulfilled. I'm male, so I did NS, not very young anymore, and I think if I want to try a career switch it has to be now.

Though there's the fear that studying Masters, though enjoyable and personally fulfilling to me, might not guarantee a job, and it's a huge time and money investment. Maybe it's better to just take the offer and play safe.

What do you guys think?

ps. Assume I can't work and study as I'm the Masters degree I'm considering is at an overseas university, also I'm not rushing to get married or buy house/car or anything like that...

can u be more specific? watz ur deg? watz the field u r in now? wat master r u going to take and which field u hope to get in with ur master?

some masters are more useful than others, and sometimes, highly educated but with little work experience might do more harm than good (again depending on the field/industry).

If you are certain you will not want to work ever in the area of your first degree and if this Masters is one of those that allow you to bridge the gap and thus switch to a different profession, you might as well get started on the Masters. But you have to be really sure that your Masters would lead you to a career that you will enjoy. Life is too short to be working just for money without enjoying at least half of your job.

Sometimes work experience is the most useful thing to have to decide what your true passion is. Every job has tasks which you enjoy or hate. This can help point you the direction you should be going. If you grin and bear it, take the job, stay for a year or so and then decide what you really want to do and if the Masters is worth it. Just don't jump out of the frying pan until you know what you are jumping in to.

I feel for you. I have been in your shoes before and it's a tough choice. I chose to quit and do my MA and it was the best decision I ever made but that was because I found my calling.

Thanks for the response. All my logical brain cells are telling me it's insane to give up the job, especially in this economy.

Just curious, what did you do your MA in? And your previous and current jobs?

My bachelors is in mass comm, but I don't enjoy the media industry or marcomms/pr related work, which is where many mass comm grads end up.

Am considering switching to psychology (organisational psychologist, counsellor or hr/training/devt roles) or information science (to work as a librarian/archivist/data analyst etc)

not sure if it helps, but i know a history master working as NUS librarian now.

data analyst could be difficult given ur background, due to the lack of quantitative training from ur deg. i know u may have taken some stats module from ur course, but if wat i heard about the new media mod from NUS is true... i think a year1 stats student will do a better job teaching the module.

yeah the point is i lack the academic/research/quantitative/stats skills that's required for some of the fields i have an interest in, hence my thought of doing a masters to gain these skills.

you might ask why didn't i do that in my degree? young and stupid i guess, made decision of what uni/faculty to go to based on stupid criteria like popularity and friends' influence.

I'll say go for the career switch but stay in singapore (unless money is not a problem - then go overseas!). there are many options locally such as
SMU's HR grad cert ://.smu.edu.sg/programmes/professional/hrgradcert
NTU MSc Info Studies ://.wkwsci.ntu.edu.sg/ProspectiveStudents/Graduate/MasterofScienceinInformationStudies/Pages/MasterofScienceinInformationStudies.aspx

self study UOL international masters -
://.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/birkbeck/human-resource-management-msc-postgraduate-diploma
://.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/postgraduate/birkbeck/organizational-psychology-msc-postgraduate-diploma

how do you know that you will like HR/library/archive work? I worry that you will regret just like you have regretted your degree choice. My suggestion is to go do an internship and get a taste of it before jumping into it. in fact, there are many HR/library/archive work which does not require a relevant degree. have you tried?

data analyst is very broad. what exactly are you looking for?
for example, would something like this interest you?
://.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/12262212

You will probably not like to hear what I say, but here goes my honest opinion.

There is a huge mismatch between what you say you are interested in doing and what you intend to study.

Organizational psychologist – Not going to happen, companies will not take in some engineering guy who just happen to spend 1 or 2 years studying some masters overseas. If you look at most organizational psychologist out there, they are pretty much very well established professionals with >15 years experience in a related field.

Counsellor – Possible, this is one avenue that studying that masters might help, but do note that it is likely you will end up in either some stat board subsidiary or NGO or VWO which means limited pay and long working hours. Think through carefully first.

Training – Very much an administrative and lowly paid role taken up by at most some generic bachelor’s degree / diploma with experience, you are just wasting money and time to get a Masters in order to do such menial jobs. Most HR folks in training are either ladies with very little interest in climbing the career ladder or old uncles relaxing for retirement.

Organization Effectiveness / Learning & Development etc – Specialized and highly paid roles that are very hard to break into. People who get there are either young high potentials / management trainees who are recruited by mega MNCs (only mega companies can afford to pay for such roles) or high performing mid career HR folks who have chalked up many years of experience in either operations HR or training.

By the time you finish your masters, you will be a early/mid 30s guy without any stellar academic or internship records and largely irrelevant previous work experience, chances for you to get into HR specialist role is very very slim as it is too competitive.

Then we go to your other interest, that is “information science” (whatever that means), you mentioned 3 jobs librarian/archivist/data analyst.

Librarian – Pretty much a job taken up by diploma and below, you will just end up over qualified

Archivist – Possible, but I do not see how a masters in psychology helps. Might as well try and apply with what you have now

Data analyst – I assume its just generic junior level data crunching for either private/public sector. Again you might as well try and apply with what you have now.

to the above post...

not sure wat kind of librarians you are thinking of... but some librarians do need a deg or even master and above... and they are quite well paid (not fantastic but decent).



Taken from NUS library:

Your responsibilities may include:
- Providing advanced reference support to users accessing resources
and services
- Liaising closely with faculty and students through outreach activities
- Identifying information resources to enhance our outstanding
collections
- Designing and delivering innovative information literacy programs
directly or through the NUS learning management system
- Providing online access to digital and physical collections

Requirements :

University degree and/or a postgraduate qualification in library and information management
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
A strong service orientation
An ability to adapt to and embrace change
Sound organisational, problem solving and time management skills

dude, don't spread misinformation and sound as if you know a lot. your post is littered with sweeping statements and fallacies.

some glaring ones:

librarians are diploma jobs and below? please educate yourself before spouting such nonsense.

organisational psychologists are not restricted to >15 year professionals. go log on to moo's career page and look at the opening. anyway OP isn't 'some engineering guy', i'm doubting your basic comprehension skills now. ministries like msf and mindef also hire psychologists and while i'm not sure about fresh grad prospects it's definitely not restricted to >15 years exp or more.

apologies for typo, i meant MOE.

what a piece of crappy negative thinking sheet.

as long as ur determine everything also can. it is negative ppl like u forever will be doing low level jobs scared this scared that.

librarians are one of the most prestigious jobs, i know of someone who only got in after getting a phd as for psychologist many are willing to take in fresh grads.

poster on top obviously talking rubbish.

Just go & study something you like, no point wasting time on some cmi lousy job. Most people are studying masters now, bachelor degree no selling point.

here's some additional info if threadstarter wants to find out more about being a librarian
://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.sg/
://ramblinglibrarian.blogspot.sg/ (read his older posts)

maybe you can consider market research jobs? there are positions with a lot of number crunching and a communications background is always a plus.

Librarians are seen as a proper professionals with proper qualifications and pay that are higher than accountants / actuaries. Experienced librarians with 6-8 yrs experience can easily make 220k+ a year.

Obviously another idiot making sweeping statements and fallacies

pyschologist can make a lot more even than dr, the trick is to build up network and reputation first

I know a lot of corporate high flyers who mid career change to librarian, it is a high paying job that is hard to get in cauz a lot of competition.

one point - i've heard that ntu's masters programs are chock full of students from india and other southeast asian countries, where they have an abysmal standard of english. it might be a pain to work on group projects/presentations with them.

if you can afford it i'd recommend an overseas education solely for the experience.

i had no idea librarians are so well paid. Shdn't everyone be dying to be a librarian if the pay is so well?

And really, what's so difficult about being a librarian? I might be misinformed but i don't see what are the difficult challenges of being a librarian.

another sweeping statement from a ignorant guy, must be the same guy who posted the negative posting on top before.

librarian is a well respected highly qualified job, dun insult others if u dun know anything.

nope still same me. Maybe you are a librarian, it wasn't my intention to insult librarian. But really i don't see what's so difficult about a librarian's job. You have to understand my exposure to librarians were people sitting in the office in the library, with no idea what they were doing.

Maybe you should list in detail what's required of a librarian's job. I could only go to NLB's job posting website and see some job vacancies. Honestly doesn't seem too difficult to do, biggest requirement is more job experience for senior roles. No salary numbers so i don't know.

https://www.nlb.gov.sg/apply/JobApplication.aspx

I think this whole nonsense started because I made a general comment earlier that one only needs a diploma to be a librarian and advised the TS not to bother to study for a Masters if he just wants to be a librarian.

Somehow certain person(s) seem to take grave offence and latch on to that tiny minority (maybe 1% of all librarians?) of niche librarian positions in specialised institutes of higher learning that required a degree and turned this whole discussion into a librarian cheer leading contest.

Just to make it clear, I meant no denegration to librarians in general, but in the context of TS's predicament it really makes no sense to waste time and money going for a Masters degree if his/her intention is to take up a role that generally requires only basic tertiary education.

Its okay to be misinformed. There are different classes of librarians. The run of the mill book sorter in NLB is one type. Another one is the ones in academia, in tertiary institutes. These librarians are professional. They need to not only know what content is in what books, but they also need to know about research papers. Say if I need to do research on a particular field that is highly specialised, there might still be a few tens of thousands of research articles to pore through. The librarians help in sorting this out for you, choosing and selecting for you which papers might be relevant to your research. This means that these librarians may require some knowledge of anything between CMOS transistors in engineering and Ethical Egoism in Philosophy, because they have the entire university to serve.

No need what knowledge lah. JUST GOOGLE.

Yes yes. No one needs any knowledge. Can just google everything. Dont send your kids to school. Ask them sit in front of the computer and just google everything. Confirm will be smart. Please la. By the time you get to your third year of undergrad studies, most of the things you learn also cant find on google. Even wikipedia is just an inch shallow when you are talking about engineering and science specialisations. Not to mention that the whole point of research itself is to find something NEW. That means it wont even be on google in the first place lol.

for the uninitiated, google have a research platform, scholar.google.com.

for the uninitiated again, there are librarian jobs which require PhD and masters. Some of these roles are masters in computer science, where the person develops the whole computing library platform. Like the national libraries in US keeping archives of historical artifacts requiring high security worth millions and billions. The PhD people fall into the information keeping of libraries. These can be anything from data-mining to data organization and artificial intelligence using the vast amount of texts.

Librarian is not just the housekeepers you see at NLB.