HOW IMPORTANT IS MY CGPA TO MY CAREER

HOW IMPORTANT IS MY CGPA TO MY CAREER

A reader writes:

How important is a college (or high school) GPA, graduating summa cum laude, etc. to hiring managers? I teach college students, and have a number who are convinced that anything other than a 4.0 is a death knell for all their future plans. While I know that my voice alone can’t counteract the stresses of a tough job market and high parental and personal expectations, I’d like to be able to tell my students that most hiring managers don’t much care about your GPA. Is this true?

I know that GPA is important for further education (grad school, law school, med school, etc.), but it seems that demonstrating critical thinking, a narrative of improvement through hard work and problem solving, an excellent cover letter and resume using AAM tips, etc. will do a lot more for you than a 4.0 on the job market. Then again, I’m in academia myself and generally did pretty well in school, so I’m hardly the most qualified person to claim such things from my own experience. I’d appreciate your thoughts, and those of your readers.


This is one of those things where being in school is warping their perspective on what employers care about. I urge you to blow their minds by letting them know that — while it’s true that GPA does matter for a small number of fields (like law and big accounting) — in the vast majority of fields, the vast majority of employers don’t ask about GPA at all or even expect to see it on a resume.

To be clear, good grades aren’t worthless in job hunting. If you have a high GPA, that’s worth including on a resume for the first few years you’re out of school (I’d define “high” in undergrad as 3.7 or above), because it can signal “smart and a hard worker.” But otherwise, you can skip including it at all, and its absence isn’t going to signal “not smart and not a hard worker.” In most fields, it’s more of a bonus than a requirement … although, again, there are some fields where it’s more requirement than bonus, so your students will want to know the expectations and norms in the fields they want to go into it.

And of course, once your students have been out of school long enough to have real-world work accomplishments, their GPA will become pretty meaningless. Its value is as a rough stand-in when they don’t yet have real work experience to point to, in order to demonstrate what they might be capable of. And even then, most employers know that it’s an imperfect gauge; lots of people with high GPAs end up doing mediocre work, and lots of people with unimpressive GPAs end up excelling in their careers. But early in your career when there isn’t much of a track record to look at, some employers will use GPA as a predictor of how well a person is likely to do. But even in those cases, they’re not typically looking for perfect 4.0’s — they’re looking for high 3s.

And high school? High school GPA matters pretty much not at all once you’re in college. 99.9% of employers don’t want to hear about anything that happened pre-college, and the 0.1% exception are weirdos who no one wants to work for.

Posted via Blogaway