If you know exactly what you want, the best way to get a job is to get specialized training. A recent report shows that companies like graduates in such fields as business and health care who can go to work immediately with very little on-the-job training.
That’s especially true of booming fields that are challenging for workers. At Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, for example, bachelor's degree graduates get an average of four or five job offers with salaries ranging from the high to low and plenty of chances for rapid advancement. Large companies especially like a background of formal education coupled with work experience. But in the long run, too much specialization does not pay off. Business, which has been flooded with MBAs, no longer considers the degree an automatic stamp of approval. The MBA may open doors and command a higher salary initially, but the impact of a degree washes out after five years.
As further evidence of the erosion of corporate faith in specialized degrees, Michigan State’s Scheetz cites a pattern in corporate hiring practices. Although companies tend to take on specialists as new hires, they often seek out generalists for middle and upper-level management. This sounds like a formal statement that you approve of the liberal-arts(文科) graduate. Time and again labor-market analysts mention a need for talents that liberal-arts majors are assumed to have: writing and communication skills, organizational skills, open-mindedness and adaptability, and the ability to analyze and solve problems. David Birch, manager of the Boston Red Sox, says that he does not hire anybody with an MBA or an engineering degree. “I hire only liberal-arts people because they have a less-than-canned way of doing things,” says Birch.
For a liberal – arts degree, students focus on some basic courses that include literature history, mathematics, economics, science, human behavior and a computer course or two. With these useful and important courses, you can feel free to specialize, “A liberal-arts degree coupled with an MBA or some other technical training is a very good combination in the marketplace,” says Scheetz.
67. The job market is in great need of people with          .
A. special training in special fields                     B. a bachelor’s degree in education
C. formal schooling and work experience        D. an MBA degree from top universities
68. The underlined sentence in Paragraph 2 means         .
A. an MBA degree does not help in future promotion
B. MBA programs will not be as popular as they are now
C. people will not forget the degree the MBA graduates have got
D. most MBA programs fail to provide students with a foundation
69. David Birch says that he only hires liberal – arts people because          .
A. they will follow others’ ways of solving problems
B. they can do better in bundling changing situations
C. they are well trained in a variety of specialized fields
D. they have attended special programs in management
70. The author supports the idea that          .
A. on – the – job training is less costly in the long run
B. formal schooling is less important than job training
C. specialists are more expensive to hire than generalists
D. generalists will do better than specialists in management