Future Trends: Non-Business Major Certifications?

By Coffey Zhang, Campus Representative, University of Wisconsin

Last week, the Department of Management and Human Resources in the University of Wisconsin – Madison School of Business launched three new certificate programs that allow all UW-Madison students, regardless of major to probe entrepreneurship and innovation in society.

For the undergraduates, the certificate is the Undergraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship. With the growing competition among the undergraduate students in terms of looking for internships or full-time jobs, people seek alternative methods to distinguish themselves and draw employers’ attention to them. While many students choose to add extra majors to the existing one, others rather obtain a certificate. The latter seems advantageous in terms of time saving and low risks. Compared to double-major or triple-major, have a certificate only requires taking limited amount of courses. It is a comparably time-saving strategy unlike devoting all the semesters to complete the extra major courses. In addition, the risk is low. Again, in contract to enroll in a dual bachelors program, where all the major GPAs will be listed separately or sometimes required by employers in the job applications, one needs to be very careful their major courses excel; however, for certificates, either you have it or not.

The chart in this post shows the statistics for the Certificate in Business for non-business majors in the University of Wisconsin – Madison. It can be seem that the number of candidates who applied for this certificate is consistently high. That is to say, non-business majors’ students show many interests every year to business-related programs. Furthermore, with the growing numbers of people who are in the MBA program but not a business-related major (69%) when they were undergraduates, there is an obvious upward trend that any business-related certifications, specializations, as well as business skills exams will be populated not only among business students but also non-business students.