Dear Jonathan, which career should I choose if salary is my priority?

"I’m approaching graduation and want a career that pays well, both to secure my own future and to support my family. Which careers should I consider if maximising my earnings is my priority, and what might I have to sacrifice along the way?"

- 4th year undergraduate Crankstart scholar

While current students may be working until the year 2070, it is clearly impossible to plan a career for that whole period; however, you are asking how to balance your long-term ambition for a very real and pressing short-term need – to earn a good income.

To set the stage, the median salary for all Oxford undergraduates 15 months after leaving in summer 2024 (the latest year for which we have data), was £35,000 – and this was the same for students from the highest and the lowest quintile of social background. There is wide variation around this median, and you wonder which careers would position you above that number.

Starting salary is just one element of the compensation package, and while that is important to assess other elements such as travel loans, health/gym/other benefits, and the projected salary growth. Are there formal pay reviews, and if so, on what basis and how often? Are there bonuses based on performance?

As well as income, it’s worth thinking about what your own cost of living will be: these are not fixed, as high paying industries will attract high spenders, and to fit in you may find it harder to resist high spending for example, on where you live, your flat/house, your clothes, holidays etc.

Philosophically, what you choose to trade off does depend on your approach to life, your flexibility, appetite for risk taking, openness to opportunism, and how fixed you are on certain roles/industries. Is high pay a clear primary objective and it doesn’t matter at all in what industry, role, or location you work; or are there, in fact, some industries, roles and locations that you would not work in? 

It may also be helpful to have an open conversation with your family about this to discuss your intention to support them, and at what level. One would hope that they wouldn’t want you to be completely miserable in a role to provide them with extra financial support, however generous you want to be.

Armed with a full understanding of your own objectives and how you prioritise them, plus knowing what your family think, you can consider the various jobs that you have a good chance of securing based on your skills, experience, and subject. From there you can prioritise based on pay, costs of any extra training (e.g., to be a lawyer would require more fees), and then start applying.

While this may feel like you are making a compromise, everyone does that throughout their career – often driven by a combination of family responsibilities, opportunity, the economy, geo-political activity, interests, and so on. Perhaps compared with peers, one of these forces is more important to you at the moment.

Given the fast-changing workplace of emerging industries and new skills, your choice may feel like you are closing off some options later, but since one doesn’t really know what the choices will be in 10 or 20 years’ time, perhaps it’s of less importance than it used to be.

For six years, the Careers Director at the University of Oxford, Jonathan Black, wrote a fortnightly column for the Financial Times answering readers’ careers questions - you can still find it here.

Now, the “Dear Jonathan" column has come to Oxford.

If you are an Oxford University student, send in your career question to [email protected] and each week of term, he will answer one of the questions in this feature. We’ll anonymise the author (but please tell us whatever is relevant) so you can be sure that readers won’t know it’s you.