Employment Trends: Desirable Applicant Skills of Physics Degree Holders

Many undergraduates in physics see graduate school as the ultimate goal of their education. However, the majority of physics Bachelors find employment outside of academia. Physics training encompasses a diverse set of skills—physics degree holders at all levels are highly employable in the private and government sectors, which may require a different type of skill set than academia. To investigate this point, my work this summer has focused on extracting desirable skills based on sector and degree requirements from the data available to APS. Over the course of my internship, I developed a program to collect and process APS Job Board postings, exporting common keywords that may hold significance, based on a variety of factors. The board pools job postings in various job sectors from APS and partner societies, including Physics Today, SPS, AAPM, and IEEE Computing. In collaboration with my mentor, I took this data and found the most relevant keywords to analyze.