 is a management information systems degree worth it. That's what we're going to be talking about today, but before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers and opportunities that are going to lead you to success. And we also go over some of the common financial traps that so many people fall for. If you're new here, and that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss an opportunity. All right, now with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. What is management information systems? Management information systems is the study of processes, people and technology from an organizational point of view. Now it focuses on the type of software and hardware that is used to gather data for analysis. It focuses on improving the organization's quality of service, as well as helping people in the higher up positions make decisions for the company. Now at this degree, there's around 8,000 graduates every single year, so it's somewhat popular, but not to the point where too many people are getting into it. Now this one, it's a really good combination of the technological side of things, as well as the business side of things. So there are a lot of careers out there that you can go into. A lot of the time, MIS grads are going to go into the finance industry, so they'll work for banks and finance companies, etc. MIS is different from information technology in that it has a little bit more of an emphasis on management as well. Usually there's going to be very complex management systems. And then on top of that, MIS has more of an emphasis on the processes within a company that make money. So an IT person might set up computers and make sure stuff like that is just running really smoothly, but they aren't necessarily going to work on the processes within the company that are designed to make money. So I always like to talk about four main categories in these videos. I'll go over salary, satisfaction, job outlook, and then I'll also talk about X factors. And then at the very end, I'm going to give you a total score for management information systems. So generally speaking, you're going to make around $60,000 starting out in your first five years after graduating with a degree and then 10 years and after, you're going to make around $105,000 a year. And that's known as mid-career pay. So this one is a very flexible degree. There's a ton of different careers that you can go into. I'm going to talk about a few of them today. The first one we're going to talk about is a database administrator. So the main thing here is going to be managing data and information through proper transfer and storage. Usually this will be extremely important data that you can directly use either in sales or marketing in order to make the company more profits. But sometimes it's less important data that the company wants to store anyways. Now database administrators are going to make around $93,000 a year. There's 132,000 jobs available right now and it's growing at 10%, which is much faster than average. Next possible career on the list would be a security analyst. Now they're going to be all about the security of the company's information systems and they're going to investigate things whenever there's a data breach, for instance. They're going to make around $99,000 a year. There's 131,000 jobs available and it's growing at 31%, which is much, much faster than average. Next one on the list would be a computer systems analyst. This is a really good one and it's kind of a retroactive type career where you're going to be looking back on the history of a company, examining the computer systems within the company and figuring out how you can make them either more efficient or make them better in such a way where they could make the company a little bit more profit. With this career, you're going to make around $90,000 a year. There's 632,000 jobs available and it's growing at 7%, which is faster than average. The next one on the list is going to be a network and computer systems administrator and this is a career that you can also get into with an information technology degree. They're going to be taking care of the day-to-day basic communications and technology needs within a company. So they're going to be making sure that an email server is working correctly, for instance. They make around $83,000 a year. There's 373,000 jobs available and it's growing at 4%, which is about average. Last one on the list is going to be a computer and information systems manager. Now, this is pretty obvious that this is a career path you'd go for if you graduate with a management information systems degree. Now, this one is also going to have the highest annual pay, but there's also going to be a trade-off. You're also going to have the most responsibility out of any career that I've mentioned. Now, a lot of the time, you'll start off working in a different career and then you'll work your way up to this position and you're going to be basically making sure that the company has solutions to their advanced technological problems and you're going to be managing other people who are also doing IT or information systems management. Now, they're going to make around $146,000 a year. There's 461,000 jobs available and it's growing at 10%, which is much, much faster than average. So, if you're able to think strategically when it comes to technology and you really know what you're doing when it comes to business and leadership and management, this might be the ultimate job for you. Overall, as you see, a lot of the careers on this list have very high salaries. I'm going to give this one a salary score of 9.5 out of 10. Next on the list, we're going to be talking about satisfaction. Now, this is the most subjective out of all of the different sections that I talk about. Satisfaction can be completely different depending on the person and the situation. Some people might love a cushy desk job where they hardly do any work all day long and it's just like basically kind of like clock watching and checking Facebook. Other people might absolutely hate that. That would be like the definition of hell for them. Other people might want a job where they're outside all day. Maybe they're hiking around the forest like a forest or type job, something along those lines. So this one is totally subjective and each person is going to have to do research for themselves. But I do think there's a few things here that you can talk about so you can decide whether this is a good career for you. And there are a few things that generally speaking are going to lead to higher employee satisfaction as well as meaning. Now, with the jobs that are related to management information systems according to pay scale, they generally have a meaning score, meaning people that find the job meaningful. They think that they are actually contributing in a positive way to the world of around 45 to 55%. That's about average for all different types of degrees and all different types of careers. So they're going to be working with computers all the time. They might not be getting very much social interaction and they might not be able to see how their work is positively impacting the world. However, the job satisfaction score, the average job satisfaction score for these occupations is actually pretty good. It's around 70% for nearly all of them. Now, there's probably a few different reasons for this. A lot of the careers related to this have really good pay. There's also a lot of job flexibility and there's a lot of demand. So if the company doesn't treat you right, you can easily find a job with another company. So overall, I'm going to give MIS a score of eight for job satisfaction. Next one on the list, we're going to be talking about demand. Now, in some ways, demand might actually be the most important out of any of these on the list. The reason for this is because if a career is really high in demand, the salary is naturally going to go up. Companies are going to be willing to pay more and more for people that have the skills in order to do that career. The companies will also tend to want to treat you better, give you more opportunities, give you better benefits just because of the fact that they want to treat you really well so that they can keep you. A really obvious example of this is of course a lot of those companies in Silicon Valley, like Google, Facebook, etc., that treat their employees like royalty. We're talking free food, free massages, an hour off in the middle of the day to do whatever they want. Really good benefits. They have like a personal pharmacy and a personal doctor that they can see pretty much at any time. They'll pay for you to take classes on pretty much any subject that you want. Now all of the careers that I mentioned had at least an average growth rate or a higher than average growth rate and they're all also in the technology industry, which is one of the industries where people tend to get treated really well. So for instance, database administrators had a 10% growth rate, information security analysts had a 31% growth rate, computer systems analysts had a 7% growth rate, and then network and computer systems administrators had a 4% growth rate, that was the worst one, and then computer and information systems managers had a 10% growth rate. And those are just a few of the careers that you can get into with this degree. A lot of people also end up becoming software developers or they might get into IT consulting. There's a lot of different ways that you can go. This is an extremely flexible degree where you can go into so many different careers. So if for whatever reason, you know, you did your research, you got into a certain career and you really just don't like it, you're not stuck there. There's a ton of different options out there for you. And flexibility in my opinion is extremely underrated. People don't really talk about it enough. So it's great that there's a lot of demand for these careers, but it's also really good that they are very flexible and there's a ton of different careers out there that you can go for with this degree. If you want to focus more on the technology side of things, that's like your passion. You can definitely go down that route. And if you want to, you know, specialize in more of a business side of things with a little bit of technology on the side, you can definitely go down that route as well. So this one is fantastic when it comes to demand and flexibility. I'm going to go ahead and give this one a score of 8.5 out of 10. Next one on the list, we're going to be talking about X factors. And these are things that I wasn't able to talk about with all of the other ones. However, they're still very important. I would say this is the second most subjective section behind job satisfaction. But I think things in this section are still absolutely worth talking about. There are not enough people out there that have the business skills, you know, when it comes to like management, sales, et cetera. And they can combine that with the technology and the technical side of things that so many businesses need these days. If you can have both of these skills in one, you're pretty much never going to be looking for a job. They're going to be looking for you. You can work in just about any industry out there. You can work in just about any company. You're going to have your pick of the litter. Healthcare, finance, beauty industry, travel, automotive. You want to work in the military or work for the government. There's probably a lot of jobs there as well. Now, one of the small problems that I talk about with some of the other technology related degrees is sometimes you are a little bit too specific. Like your skill set is a little bit too niche. I talk about this in my video, the worst technology degrees where there's some degrees out there. Like I think there was one printing technology, for instance. It was probably good like 20 years ago. And then they basically made the printer pretty much as good as it's possibly going to get. They're not going to improve on it all that much. And so people that have this very specific skill set probably found themselves without a job. With a management information systems degree, what you're able to do is not only do you have that technical skill, so you have that background and technical skill, but there is a focus on business as well as management. So a lot of the time as you get older, and this is kind of a big deal in the technology industry, there's this thing that's called ageism and it's kind of pretty controversial. But you're going to have a lot more trouble learning new languages, for instance. Most people as they get older, are going to have less of what's known as fluid intelligence, where you're going to have a lot of trouble learning new languages and new frameworks, for instance. And so what most people do is they get older within the technology industry, is they're going to specialize within one type of language or framework or one expertise and skill that's very in demand, or they're going to move more into a management role where they manage younger people who do have that fluid intelligence and they're able to learn new languages, et cetera. So MIS sets you up perfectly for this. You can either specialize if you want to, or it's in the name management information systems, you can move into more of a management type role. This is one of the few downsides of the technology industries and technology degrees, and I think management information systems isn't nearly as affected by this as some of the other ones. So you basically never have to worry about becoming obsolete or suffering from the ageism that is very common in the technology industry. Another thing that I always like to mention when it comes to X factors is there are a lot of careers that don't actually exist right now that are going to be extremely in demand maybe 10 or 20 years from now. So how do you prepare yourself for a career that doesn't even exist yet? The answer to that is to learn really in demand skills. Management information is going to teach you those extremely in demand technology skills as well as more evergreen skills like management as well as business smarts. So you're basically going to be prepared for whatever happens in the future. I think this is an ever changing line of work and we probably haven't even scratched the surface on the opportunities that are going to pop up in the next 10 to 20 years. I really don't think these careers that you get into with a management information systems degree are going to be automated. So not only are there a lot of safe jobs out there right now but there's going to be even more in the future in my opinion. I spend a lot of time looking at what's known as futurology trends. There's even an entire subreddit dedicated to futurology and in my opinion management information systems is definitely one of the most future proof degrees. Now on top of this one of the biggest x factors that I haven't even mentioned yet is once you get a few years of experience in management information systems and doing a career a lot of the time there's going to be a lot of opportunities out there for you to actually go out and start your own business. You'll likely be working within either the technology industry or finance and there are a ton of options in both of those industries. So you'll work for a few years, build up your skills, get the required knowledge for you to know exactly what you're doing and become an expert. You'll also get some management and some business related experience. So it's almost like being an entrepreneur with training wheels. Then once a really good opportunity pops up which you'll be positioned perfectly to know what good opportunities are since you're working in an industry that has so much opportunity you can either quit your job or start that business on the side and then whenever it gets big enough you can quit your job. I made a video called the degrees that create the most millionaires and I think six or seven out of 10 of those degrees on that list were business related degrees. Another one on the list was computer science and that one was moving up the fastest out of all of them. Now I think the reason for this is two different things. One, a lot of people who are in these different business related degrees who get those degrees end up starting businesses later on in life. And then two, people who get into business and they learn about business from an early age tend to be a little bit better with their finances. They learn about things like saving, budgeting, investing, etc. And that makes it very easy for them to save and invest at an early age which means you're pretty much guaranteed to be rich if you invest at an early age for instance in a Roth IRA or a 401k. Most people don't start saving and investing until they're in their 30s or 40s so if you can start doing that at a young age you're way ahead of the curve. And business degrees tend to just be those types of degrees that end up doing really well when it comes to finance even if they don't make as much money as something like a doctor for instance at the end of the day they end up making more money in the long run just because of the fact that they learn basic personal finance skills. At least that's what I found in my research I know that's kind of partially my opinion. It could also be because people who are interested in going into business also tend to be better with money so it could be correlation and not causation. But anyways, with everything I've mentioned about MIS when it comes to the X factors I think this one actually has the best X factors maybe out of any degree that I've ever looked at up to this point. I'm going to go ahead and give this one a score of 11 out of 10. I only give one degree a score of 11 out of 10 unless I find one that's just as good in the future. And so this is actually the best one that I've ever evaluated. I truly do think that this degree is future proof. So the pros here like I mentioned before there's going to be a really good salary. I always talk about on this channel studies that have been done that show that your happiness increases up to a certain point. The study said that it was about 70 to 75,000 dollars a year that was about 10 years ago so it's more like 80 to 85,000 dollars a year at this point. But yes, studies have shown that having more money does in fact increase your happiness up to a certain point. So I always recommend that people aim for a career that will get them to that point and that is around 80 to 85,000 dollars a year. Most of these careers that I talked about today can easily get to that point. Some of them you'll even start off right away higher than that. The second pro here is flexibility. This one is extremely flexible. There are so many different career paths that you can go down. Not only do you have so many different options of careers that exist now but you're also preparing yourself for careers that might not even exist yet and they will exist in the future. Next one on the list would be career growth. There's a lot of different positions that you can move up to with this skill set. You can even move up to an executive level because of the fact that you have that business background. There are some positions where executives are making millions and millions of dollars a year. We're talking about like vice presidents, presidents, CEOs, CFOs, etc. Generally speaking, the people that make it to those positions are going to be business degree graduates. Management information systems is kind of like a business degree mixed with a technology degree so that's actually open to you. You also get to kind of sample everything if you want to and then choose which specialization that you want to do for the rest of your life. The next one on the list is you're going to be developing your problem-solving skills. Now you won't be just learning that in school. You'll also be learning it when you get your first job and you're going to be learning quite a bit with on-the-job training. School can only teach you so much. I always like to say this but anything can be learned but not anything can be taught and sometimes you just have to simply do it in order to learn. Now problem-solving is not only valuable when it comes to the career that you're in but problem-solving is the heart of entrepreneurship so this makes such a good segue into becoming an entrepreneur. Now some of the cons on this list are going to be continuous education. This is not one of those careers where you get your degree and you don't have to learn anything else after that. You are constantly going to be taking different certifications, learning new things. Not only will you be gaining new knowledges but technological advancements are happening so fast. It's pretty much non-stop at this point. So some of the stuff that you knew like five years ago might be just completely worthless. Now you have to learn a completely new system or framework. Another con here is especially if you're moving into a managerial position you're probably going to have long and kind of weird working hours. So if something goes wrong with a server for instance in the middle of the night you're going to get a call and you're going to have to solve that problem ASAP because of the fact that these careers are so in demand and there's simply not enough people to fill them the unfortunate downside even though there's a lot of upside to that is that you will probably be on call and they're going to put a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. Now from the research that I've done there will also be times where you have quite a bit of downtime. So there will likely be times where you don't actually have that much work to do and so the company will probably just have you work on some kind of certification or learning a new language or something along those lines. So the overall score here is going to be a 9.25 out of 10. This is a very, very good degree in my opinion. I always suggest making sure that you do that your due diligence, you know, DD make sure that you look into this look into the careers that you might want to go into and then it's always a good idea to contact people within those careers do a ton of research on it join Facebook groups, join forums and then figure out what steps it takes in order to get to that career. This is called reverse engineering and people who reverse engineer and they have a plan it's just going to be such a more like smooth process is going to be better in every way. People who just blindly go into something without a plan you're not going to know what to do so you're constantly going to have anxiety thinking oh I'm not doing enough or maybe I'm doing too much of something that isn't going to actually matter but if you have a plan you're going to know exactly what to do exactly when you're going to need to do it and exactly how much time you're going to need to spend on that stuff as with many business related or technology related careers things like getting work experience and intern experience are going to be very important it also doesn't hurt to work on projects while you're in school so that you have a portfolio to show your skills if you haven't done it already make sure to gently tap the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc that you have on the video and before you go make sure to check out my other videos right here I made them just for you