 Is a human resource management degree or major worth it? That's what we're gonna 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 gonna lead you to success, and we also go over how you can avoid some of the common financial mistakes that so many people fall for. If that sounds like something that interests you and you haven't done it already, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss an opportunity. And with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. First of all, what the heck is human resources? Well, human resources or human resource management is gonna be all about taking care of the company's most important asset, which is, of course, its people. So you're gonna need a really in-depth understanding of labor laws, of course, but you're also gonna have to be really good at communication as well as conflict resolution. And with this degree, about 6,800 people graduate every year. So first, let's go ahead and talk about salary or earning potential. So according to pay scale, if you graduate with a human resource management degree, you would expect to make around $45,000 a year starting out and 74,000 in mid-career pay. You can compare that to a really high-paying degree or a really low-paying degree, and you'll see that it's kind of somewhere in the middle and probably on the lower side. Now, two career paths you might go into is becoming a human resource manager or a human resource specialist. HR managers, according to BLS, are gonna make around $116,000 a year, and then one step down from that is gonna be HR specialists, and they make around 61,000. Now, some other career paths you might end up going down with this degree would be administrative services manager, compensation and benefits manager, or maybe a labor relations specialist. Now, this is technically a business degree, and when you look at the work life earnings, a.k.a. how much you earn over an entire lifetime, business-related degrees tend to earn more than average. So the average over a lifetime is 2.4 million, and business degrees earn around 2.6 million. And then if you go into a business-related profession, then you'd make around 2.8 million. However, if you became a manager, you'd probably make around 3.3 million. Overall, HR is not gonna be one of the higher-paying business degrees, but at the same time, it's also not bad. So I'd say it's probably a little bit above average. So for this one, I'm gonna give it a score of 7.5 out of 10 when it comes to earning potential or salary. Next, we're gonna be talking about satisfaction, and for this one, I like to combine two different things which is meaning and job satisfaction. So meaning is basically how much you think your job positively impacts the world in a significant way, and then job satisfaction is just how much do you enjoy doing your job on a day-to-day basis. So if your job was being a professional food taster and you just got to go around tasting food all day long, you'd probably enjoy that a lot, but it might be questionable whether you think it has high meaning, whether it positively impacts the world. So according to PayScale, a human resources degree has a meaning score of about 54%, meaning 54% of people who graduate with this degree go into a career where they think their job significantly positively impacts the world. Compare that to a really high score like radiation therapy or a really low score like plastics engineering technology. And you see here that it's pretty average, maybe slightly above average. When you look at a specific career like human resource manager, you see that the meaning score jumps up a little bit to around 61%, which again, slightly above average. And when you look at job satisfaction, it's about 73%, which is pretty good as well. Compare that to clergy, which has really high scores across the board and parking lot attendance, which is really low. Now just from personal experience, I know several people who have gone into HR, and of course it does depend on your personality, but they seem to really enjoy it. You would probably wanna be someone who's outgoing here because you're gonna be around other people pretty much all the time. And this section of course is extremely subjective and a lot of the time it's gonna depend on other factors that are outside of your control, like the business you work for, the industry you work in, the people that you work with, where you live, et cetera. So as long as you're not like Toby from the office, you're probably gonna be good here. No, God, please no, no. This one, I'm gonna give it a score of 8.5 out of 10. Now when it comes to demand, this is probably the most important one out of all the metrics because of the fact that it influences everything else. A lot of the time it comes down to simple supply and demand. If you learn skills that are high in demand, chances are you're gonna get paid more. Chances are that companies are going to treat you better. You're gonna get a lot more opportunities so you're gonna have higher job satisfaction, et cetera, et cetera. Now with that being said, human resource manager, which is one of the common careers, is growing at about 6% over the next 10 years, meaning there's 165,000 jobs right now and pretty soon they're going to have 10,000 new jobs created. Human resource specialist on the other hand is growing even faster at around 7% and that's with 666,000 jobs available already and that means over the next 10 years there's gonna be 46,000 new jobs created. Now if you search monster.com for the keyword human resource management degree, you'll see that around 28,000 jobs pop up. This is pretty good and you can compare it to something that has extremely high demand like computer science or something that has really low demand like anthropology. However, there's one really, really big problem here and that is you can get into human resource management with a bunch of different types of degrees. In fact, a lot of people end up getting social science or liberal arts degrees and their plan is to become a human resource manager or a human resource specialist. So you don't necessarily have to get a human resource management degree in order to get into HR. To me, that's a really big red flag because even if it's not saturated right now, there's a good chance it will be saturated soon because of the fact that all these other degrees can get into that particular career. There's a little to no barrier to entry there and so a lot of the time it might be a better idea for you to get a different degree and you'll always have that option. On top of that, business related degrees are known for being extremely flexible. You can get a business degree and go into all kinds of different careers. Human resource management is one of the few business related degrees that kind of pigeonholes you to a specific skillset. So don't get me wrong, there are other career paths that you can go down but it's not gonna be as flexible as if you got an accounting degree or a finance degree. So for that reason, I'm gonna have to give this one a 6.5 out of 10 when it comes to demand. Next, let's talk about X factors and that's gonna be anything that we haven't talked about yet and I usually like to focus on skills, flexibility and how easily something will be automated or outsourced. Now, like I mentioned before, over a lifetime business degree graduates tend to earn above average and there's a ton of different career paths that they can go into. Business degrees are great for combining with other types of degrees in order to make them more flexible and more marketable. HR management is kind of a little bit of an exception here though. Sure, you can combine it with certain other types of degrees like maybe psychology for instance but there's a lot of combinations that don't make a lot of sense. Now, when you look at the skill itself of human resource management, Zip recruiter shows that it has a score of about 34 out of 100. Now to give context to that, the highest score is gonna be software engineering at 88 and one of the lowest scores is industrial sewing at eight. And this is basically how much businesses out there are willing to pay people that have certain skills. That doesn't necessarily mean that the skill isn't inherently valuable, it just means how much businesses are willing to pay at this particular time in history. And human resource management is definitely on the lower side here. Now, luckily the likelihood of it being automated is extremely low, about 0.6% chance. Another positive or you could maybe think of it as a negative depending on your perspective is that business related degrees tend to not be that difficult. When I was in college, I lived in a scholarship hall with 50 guys and there were pretty much people in every different type of degree path. I can tell you the people who studied engineering physics were studying all the time. A lot of the science related degrees were pretty tough too, same with math. However, the business people were pretty much just partying and having fun all the time, even during the weekdays. So I know this is subjective, everybody's got their strengths and weaknesses and their talents, but I'm just thinking objectively speaking, business degrees are not gonna be as hard as some of the other ones. So overall, when it comes to X factors, I'm gonna give HR management a six out of 10. So some of the pros here are that it does have a relatively decent satisfaction rating if you are able to get a job. The salary is also pretty decent, especially if you're able to move up to those higher level positions. And this is gonna be really good for certain personalities. There's some people that absolutely love HR. Cons here is that the workload can be stressful, you're gonna be dealing with a lot of conflict, you're probably gonna have to fire people as well as decide who you're going to hire. A lot of the higher paying positions are gonna require a lot of work experience. And there's gonna be a lot of competition because there's tons of other degrees that can go into the same career fields. So overall, I'm gonna give this one a score of 7.125 out of 10. It's viable, you can definitely go into it and it can be great for the right person. You wanna make sure that you do your research, know exactly what you're getting yourself into. It might be a good idea for some people to just take extra classes in HR, maybe minor in it or double major instead of fully just going all the way in and majoring in just an HR management degree. This way, if you end up going into HR, that's great, but you're also gonna have some more flexibility, you're gonna have other choices just in case you change your mind. Now, if you want more help doing research on the right college degree for you and you don't wanna wait for my video to come out, check out my Patreon down below where I have the college degree ranker version 1.1. In my opinion, this is the best resource for college degrees that's ever been created. I know that sounds dramatic, but I worked really hard on this. And pretty soon, I'm gonna be coming out with an even better version, version 1.2. If you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Hit that subscribe button, ring the notification bell and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera, that you have on the video. Sharing the video really helps a lot. Share with any friends who you might think this would be of interest to. And before you leave, check out my other videos right here, I made them just for you. ["Just For You"]