Teaching Tip: Why Students Should Major in OM and IT

You might want to point your OM students (who typically want to major in Accounting, Finance, or Marketing) to a fascinating USA Today (Jan. 24, 2017) article on the “50 Best Jobs in America.” Jobs that require a range of STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and math) claimed 14 spots in Glassdoor’s new survey. This includes the top-seeded position: data scientist, a job in which employs math and computer programming skills to wrestle huge amounts of raw data into intelligible and useful data sets. That job took the crown with a leading Glassdoor score that reflected the number of openings for the position (currently 4,184), a top company satisfaction rating (reflective of culture and values) and a healthy median base salary ($110,000).

Here are some others that share skills we teach in operations management:

#2 DevOps Engineer (2725 openings, $110,000 salary); #3 Data Engineer (2599, $106,000); #5 Analytics Manager (1958, $112,000); #7 Data Base Administrator (2977, $93,000); #18 Supply Chain Manager (1270, $100,000); #22 Quality Control Manager (2531, $92,000); #42 Operations Manager (1009, $93,000); #45 Supplier Quality Manager (862, $80,000); #50 Construction Project Manager (1944, $85,000).