What jobs “just want any degree”?

I’ve seen a lot of people argue that college is worth it because a lot of jobs just want you to have a bachelor’s degree. My question is… where are they? Where are these jobs that don’t care about what you studied? Where do you find them? If they’re so plentiful, why are history majors not doing better? I’m not asking antagonistically, I’m legitimately curious.

Jobadvisor

Fair question, and it's worth unpacking because "any degree works" is true but misleading in ways that explain exactly the frustration you're describing.

Where these jobs actually are

Most "degree required, major doesn't matter" roles cluster in a few categories:

• Corporate generalist tracks: sales (especially B2B/SaaS), account management, HR/recruiting, operations, project coordination, insurance/claims, banking (retail/branch roles), and management trainee programs at large companies (Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Sherwin-Williams, big insurers, consumer banks)
• Government and public sector: federal jobs often list "bachelor's degree in any field" as one qualifying path, especially GS-5/7 entry roles
• Consulting operations/analyst roles at non-elite firms (not McKinsey-tier, but mid-size firms)
• Nonprofit and admin roles: program coordinator, development/fundraising, admissions
• Some tech-adjacent roles: technical writing, project management, customer success, business development — not engineering

The degree functions as a screen for conscientiousness and trainability, not domain knowledge. Employers use it because a completed degree correlates (weakly but reliably, in the aggregate) with showing up, meeting deadlines, and finishing multi-year commitments. It's a proxy, not a credential for the job's actual content.

Why history majors aren't obviously thriving despite this

A few real reasons:

1. These jobs exist, but they're not high-paying or prestigious, so they don't show up in "is my degree worth it" success stories. Median outcome for "any degree" jobs is often $45–60k starting, not the six-figure tech/consulting/finance jobs people picture when they hear "college pays off."

2. The "any degree" jobs are competing pools. If a company says "bachelor's in anything," they get flooded with applicants from every major, and often do subtly prefer certain majors (business, communications, econ) or signals (internships, GPA, extracurriculars) even if the job posting doesn't require it. History majors aren't excluded by policy, but they're competing against people with more directly-relevant-looking resumes for the same slot.

3. Network and internship access matters more than major. A business major who did two internships at a bank has a much easier time landing an "any degree" analyst role than a history major with no internships — not because of the major, but because of what they did with the four years.

4. Selection effects in outcome data: people who choose history/English/philosophy on average are optimizing for something other than earnings (interest, grad school plans, etc.), so aggregate salary data isn't a clean test of "does major matter" — it's confounded with why people picked the major in the first place.

The honest version

"Any degree" jobs are real and plentiful, but they tend to be moderate-pay generalist roles you get through networking, internships, and interview performance — not jobs where the credential alone opens the door and the major is truly irrelevant to how competitive you are. The credential gets you past the resume screen; it doesn't win you the job over other candidates.

What skill, if learned, would guarantee a bright future?

We always hear advice like "learn to code," "network more," or "adapt to change," but the landscape is shifting faster than ever.

If you had to pick one single skill to master today—something that practically guarantees career security, personal growth, and adaptability over the next few decades—what would it be and why?

Is it technical, psychological, financial, or something else entirely? Let’s hear your thoughts.

Jobadvisor

Honest answer: nothing guarantees a bright future. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But I can tell you what comes closest, and why the framing of the question is worth pushing back on a little.

The uncomfortable truth about "guarantee"

The whole reason career advice churns through fads — coding, then "learn to learn," then AI literacy — is that no single skill has ever been immune to obsolescence or oversupply. Coding was the safe bet for 20 years; now it's contested. Any skill specific enough to be teachable is specific enough to be automated, outsourced, or flooded with competition eventually. That's not pessimism, it's just the actual track record.

What comes closest, and why

If I had to pick one thing, it's the ability to diagnose problems clearly and communicate the diagnosis persuasively — sometimes bundled as "applied judgment" or "structured thinking + communication." Here's why this one holds up better than technical skills:

• It's upstream of every technical skill. Coding, financial modeling, data analysis — all of these are ways of executing a solution. But deciding what problem is even worth solving, and convincing other people it's the right one, is a different and rarer skill. People who are good at this direct the people who are good at execution, not the reverse.
• It doesn't expire. The specific tools change every decade. The ability to look at a messy situation, figure out what's actually going on, and explain it so someone else can act on it — that's been valuable since before spreadsheets and will be valuable after whatever comes after AI.
• It's what AI is currently bad at. Models are good at execution once the problem is well-specified. They're much worse at knowing which problem matters, what's being asked implicitly, and how to frame a recommendation for a specific skeptical human. That gap is where the economic value is concentrating right now.

If you want something more concrete and learnable

"Diagnose and communicate" is true but abstract, so in practical terms it looks like:

• Writing — not creative writing, but the ability to produce a one-page memo that makes a case clearly. This is shockingly rare and shockingly valuable in every field.
• Basic quantitative reasoning — not advanced math, just comfort with numbers, so you can sanity-check claims and not be intimidated by a spreadsheet.
• Asking good questions in ambiguous situations — the skill that separates someone who needs a fully-specified task from someone you can hand a vague problem to.

The honest caveat

Even this isn't a guarantee — it's a bet with better odds, because it's the skill most resistant to any single technological or economic shift. Real security comes less from one skill and more from staying adaptable enough to keep re-skilling as conditions change — which is, admittably, the boring answer the question tried to avoid. But it's boring because it's true, not because people haven't thought of anything better.

Employer wants a reference check, I left my previous job a year ago. What should I do?

A company I'm interviewing with is asking for reference contacts during HR screening. I left my previous job about a year ago and only have the phone numbers of a few former colleagues. I don't have their old work emails, and I don't know who still works there.

Would personal Gmail addresses be acceptable for references, or do they usually require a company email?

Also, I slightly exaggerated something on my CV. It's not a completely fake job/qualification, but there is a discrepancy between my CV and what actually happened.

Could a reference/background check expose this, and what's the best way to handle it now?

Any advice?

Jobadvisor

On personal emails for references

Personal Gmail addresses are completely normal and widely accepted, especially for anyone who's changed jobs. Employers know people move on, lose access to old work accounts, and lose touch with former colleagues' current contact info. What actually matters:

• Give a phone number too, not just email. References often get contacted by phone first since it's faster.
• Give context alongside the contact, e.g., "Jane Smith, my manager at [Company], 2021–2023 — best reached at [personal email] or [phone], she's since moved to [new company]." This reassures the checker that you know who this person is and how they relate to you, even without a work email.
• Give the reference a heads-up before you list them — text or call and say "I've listed you as a reference for a new job, might get a call/email from [personal email/phone], wanted to give you a heads up." This does double duty: it makes sure they answer promptly and remember the details of your working relationship, and it lets you gently remind them what you actually did there if it's been a while.

If you genuinely can't reach anyone from a specific job, some employers accept peer/client references instead of direct managers — worth asking HR if that's an option.

On the CV discrepancy

I'll be straight with you: whether this gets caught depends heavily on what kind of discrepancy it is.

• Title/dates/scope inflation (e.g., "Senior Analyst" when you were "Analyst," or slightly stretching your dates or team size) — these often get checked in formal background checks, especially at larger companies that use third-party verification services (HireRight, Sterling, etc.) that go straight to HR/payroll records, not just your named references. Titles and dates are usually confirmed this way regardless of what your personal reference says.
• Scope/impact exaggeration (e.g., claiming you led a project you actually contributed to) — this is more likely to surface only if a reference is asked specific questions about your role, or if a hiring manager digs into specifics in an interview.

What I'd actually do:

1. Don't compound it by coaching your reference to confirm the exaggerated version — asking someone to actively misrepresent your role to a background check is a bigger risk (to both of you) than the original CV inflation, and it's not something I can help you script.
2. If it's a formal, third-party background check (verifying title/dates/employment via HR records), that data typically comes from official records, not your reference's opinion, so there's not much your reference can do either way — the discrepancy will show up if it's date/title-based, regardless of what you tell anyone.
3. If it's more about scope/impact and only your reference would know, the safer move is to quietly correct your story going forward — in the reference conversation and in future interviews — rather than doubling down. A small, quietly-corrected inconsistency is much less damaging than being caught actively maintaining a false narrative later.
4. If you're asked point-blank about the discrepancy at any stage, a brief, non-defensive clarification ("I worded that more strongly than I should have on my CV — here's what I actually did") lands far better than getting caught out.

The risk isn't really "will a background check catch this specific thing" — it's that once something doesn't line up, it invites more scrutiny into everything else you've said. The lower-stakes move now is to quietly stop repeating the exaggerated version, rather than trying to reinforce it through your references.

3 months into my job and I still don’t want to continue. Is it okay to resign without another job lined up?

I’ve been in my current job for about 3 months now, but I still feel like I really don’t want to continue.

I’ve tried giving myself time to adjust, but things don’t seem to be getting better. The work setup has been affecting me mentally. Even during weekends, I still feel anxious about work. I can’t seem to fully enjoy my rest days because I’m already thinking about the coming workweek.

I’ve been seriously considering resigning even though I don’t have another job lined up yet. I know it’s financially risky, but at this point, I also feel like my mental health is being affected too much.

For those who have been in a similar situation, would you resign even without another job waiting? Or would you try to hold on until you find another opportunity?

I’d really appreciate honest advice, especially from people who have experienced burnout or resigned without having another job lined up.

Jobadvisor

It sounds like this job is really weighing on you — anxiety that follows you into weekends and doesn't let you rest is genuinely draining, and three months of that is a real signal, not just impatience. I want to give you a straight, useful answer rather than just telling you what you want to hear.

The honest trade-off, no sugarcoating

Resigning without a job lined up is genuinely risky, but so is staying somewhere that's actively hurting you. Neither option is "safe" — it's a question of which risk you're better positioned to manage.

Questions worth answering before you decide:

• How's your financial runway? If you have 3-6+ months of expenses saved, quitting is a very different decision than if you're living paycheck to paycheck. This alone often settles the question.
• Is it the job, or is it "having a job right now"? Three months is short — sometimes it's a bad fit, sometimes it's a rough onboarding period, sometimes it's a genuinely toxic environment. Worth being honest with yourself about which one this is, since the fix is different (leave vs. wait it out vs. talk to your manager first).
• Have you named what specifically is causing the anxiety? Bad manager, unclear expectations, workload, culture, the work itself, commute, something else? If it's one identifiable, fixable thing, sometimes addressing that directly (asking for a change, having a hard conversation) is worth trying before quitting outright.
• Could you job search while employed? It's harder emotionally when you're already stretched thin, but even a few weeks of applying while still collecting a paycheck meaningfully changes your risk position. Many people find just having options in motion reduces the anxiety some.

A middle path worth considering

You don't have to choose between "grit it out indefinitely" and "quit tomorrow with nothing lined up." Some options in between:

• Set yourself a real deadline (e.g., "I'll actively job search for 6 weeks, and if nothing's landed and I still feel this way, I'll resign then") — this gives you a plan rather than an open-ended endurance test.
• Talk to a doctor or therapist if you haven't — not to get a label, but because ongoing anxiety that's affecting your rest and sleep is worth having support for regardless of what you decide about the job. Some people find short-term medical leave is an option worth exploring with a doctor, which can create breathing room without a full resignation.
• If finances allow even a short gap, sometimes stepping back for a few weeks to reset before job-hunting seriously is better than searching while burnt out — burnout tends to produce worse interview performance and worse decisions about the next job.

I'd gently push back on one framing, though: "hold on until I find something" doesn't have to mean "endure indefinitely with no plan." A time-boxed search with a real deadline gives you agency either way, rather than just gritting your teeth and hoping it gets better.

If you want, I can help you think through what a realistic financial runway looks like for your situation, or help draft what a resignation conversation might sound like once you've decided.

Hooray - my full of crap former employers are going to have to pay me unemployment

For those upset about the lack of paragraph breaks a tldr : fired and they tried to say it was because of misconduct, state said nah and now I’ll get my paltry unemployment crumbs yay 😀

Made decent money at the place but they were kind of bumbling idiots who didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to their business. I know several other employees were not happy there either. Two others gave their two week notice the day I was fired. Mind you I was fired while out of town for a family thing, not told I was fired, just taken off the schedule. When I asked why I was ghosted. So I applied for unemployment which I knew they would contest and they did alleging misconduct which was bullshit. Waited patiently on adjudication and just found out they never responded to the fact finding about misconduct but switched it to at-will employment policy (yeah I live in one of those shitty states - edit : apparently all states are at will except for Montana, weird for a red state). It’s not some giant amount of money but it will help since I’ve been dipping into savings and selling possessions on eBay or marketplace. Also ditched my expensive ACA health plan (made more expensive by me estimating a higher income based on work schedule last year which they promptly cut my hours at the first of the year) and qualified for food stamps which helped a lot. Place was a dumpster fire and they expected full time availability while only giving part time hours. While looking for a job I keep seeing job postings from there every week. I’d like to know how bad it is now and I will prob reach out to some people I know who still work there eventually, I didn’t want to while waiting on unemployment. I feel like I do have friends there but you never know if you’ll get backstabbed. Separately this summer has been a blast taking it easy and doing fun stuff I never would have had the time for and I’ve gotten tons of stuff done around my house. Oh and I filed a complaint because they wouldn’t pay out for a sick day that I had plenty of earned time for from about a month before getting fired. I’ll take whatever I can get.

Jobadvisor

That's genuinely good news, and honestly it sounds like vindication as much as anything else. They tried to paint you as the problem, didn't even bother to back it up when it counted, and got overruled. That's a pretty clean win.

The way they handled the actual firing is the part that would sit worst with me if I were you — taking you off the schedule while you're away for family stuff and making you find out by asking why, instead of just telling you. That's a chickenshit way to let someone go, and it tracks with everything else you're describing: a place that's disorganized enough to leave hourly workers without shifts on ACA-adjacent income assumptions, contest unemployment on a claim they don't even show up to defend, and stiff someone on earned sick time until it takes a formal complaint to sort out.

Filing on the unpaid sick day was the right move — that's not petty, that's earned money you were owed.

The instinct to hold off contacting former coworkers until unemployment was settled was smart. Now that it's resolved, you're free to reach out without it looking like anything but catching up. If you do want the inside scoop on how things are going, people who already gave notice around when you left are probably your safest bet — they've got less to lose by being candid, and less reason to perform loyalty to the place.

And it sounds like the summer took some of the sting out of all this — projects around the house, actual downtime. That's worth something too, even if it wasn't how you'd have chosen to get there. Hope the job search turns up something that actually deserves you.

Every workplace has someone whose real job is absorbing other people's mistakes.

It's never in the job description and never in the title. Not the highest paid person in the room. Often the lowest.

Whoever catches the invoice before it goes out wrong, or knows which supplier will actually pick up on a Saturday. Same person who sees the new one drowning and quietly takes half their work without making it a thing.

The reward for being that person is more of it. You get good at catching things, so more things get routed to you, and none of it shows up on paper anywhere.

You don't find out who it was until they leave. Then everything gets worse at once and it takes a long time to work out why.

Jobadvisor

That last line is the whole thing, isn't it. Nobody sends a memo when the person quietly absorbing all the friction leaves — it just shows up as a string of unrelated small fires a few weeks later, and everyone's confused about why the place suddenly feels harder to run.

There's something almost cruel about the mechanism you're describing: competence as a trap. You get good at catching the thing before it breaks, so the org routes you more things to catch, and because nothing ever breaks, there's no evidence it was ever fragile in the first place. The visible workers are the ones whose mistakes are visible. The person preventing mistakes leaves no trace — the absence of a disaster doesn't show up on a performance review.

It also tends to map onto who has the least power to say no. The lowest-paid person in the room doesn't have the standing to push back when things get routed to them — they just quietly become load-bearing, without the title, the pay, or the recognition that would come with actually being load-bearing.

Given the conversation we were just having — does this connect to how things were at the place that just lost the unemployment appeal? Because "everything gets worse at once and nobody knows why" sounds a lot like what happens when the two people who gave notice the same day you got fired actually leave.