Don’t just get a degree, get skills.

In college, you are developing several sets of skills. Among them are learning professionalism, developing your written and spoken communications skills, applying logic and developing analyses, as well as learning about a field or fields in depth. In some schools, this takes over completely and can leave new graduates out in the cold, especially in a tough job market. There are countless graduates in English, communications, and business every year and a lot of them will end up looking the same on paper.

That is not to say that you should not study those things if that is what you want to do. It just means that you need to be prepared to do more. If you are a communications major, you should probably leave school with a working familiarity with HTML and Photoshop, at the very least. If you are a business school graduate who is not familiar with STATA and SPSS, your competitors who do are they are going to be ahead of you for jobs. The ability to type quickly and with few errors, to be comfortable using an email client, Excel, or Publisher, or having some GIS mapping skills, are all things that you can add to your resume that set you apart from graduates who think that a degree itself is enough.

Other skills that are valuable, especially if you plan to work for nonprofits or governmental organizations, include the ability to research, locate, and write grants. Chances are that there are professors and departments throughout the university with whom you could develop these skills. You may even find that that there are grants that you yourself could apply for, making the skill useful not only for getting a job once your education is complete but using it to help pay for your education in the meantime.

Whatever your field, the answer to what additional skills you need is to look at what people who work in your field do on a daily basis. Are your classes teaching you how to do those things? If not, it might be time to make some changes.