Perhaps the biggest fear when picking subjects for the IB Diploma is – what if I don’t know what I want to be when I’m older? What if I get it wrong, will I still be able to change careers or will I forever be locked into what I choose to study now?

1. IB Subject Selection – The importance of
transferable skills
Perhaps the biggest fear when picking your IB subjects is – what if I don’t know what I want to be
when I’m older? What if I get it wrong, will I still be able to change careers or will I forever be
locked into what I choose to study now?
The important to thing to know is that although IB subject selection matters – and of course, your
IB subject selection will have an impact on the courses you pursue at university and careers you
choose – this impact will be limited.
What will really matter are the transferable skills you have acquired throughout your IB
programme.
How do we know this? Nearly half of all solicitors in the UK did not pursue a law degree at
university, they studied things ranging from Art History to Physics. Many of the top bankers are
not graduates in accounting or finance, they are engineers or mathematicians. There is no school
for spies – then how does one get recruited by a spy agency?
Clearly there are things beyond specific subjects which matter – these are transferable skills.
So, what do we mean by transferable skills?
Transferable skills are those things you know which can be transferred from one situation to
another. To take a simple example, when you learn to read a map, you don’t just learn how to
read a particular map – you can use your map-reading ability to decipher other maps.
Thus, map-reading is a transferable skill. Some of the other skills which you will have picked up
along with map-reading are – spatial reasoning, judging directions and visualization. These are
things which will also be useful in other things that you do –driving a car, for example.
In today’s rapidly changing world, it is hard to predict what the future will demand of us. Jobs in
popular fields such as data mining, social media, human-computer interaction and even being a
professional YouTube publisher did not exist even 10 years ago. It is impossible for schools to
have predicted that film studies should cover the psychology of creating viral YouTube videos as
an essential part of their course.
However, those who are making viral YouTube videos are drawing on a number of skills –
understanding user motivations and preferences, determining the common characteristics of all
viral YouTube ads and researching the best time and location to release a video to make it go
viral. These would not have been taught in any subject they studied at school, but their ability to
think logically, think creatively and to effectively collect and understand lots of data will have
been developed across various courses they took.
How can we apply these insights to IB subject selection?
Every subject can be broken down into two parts – content knowledge and skills. The content
knowledge is undoubtedly important, but it is limited to what you learn during the course;
however, the skills you acquire will stay with you forever and play a greater role in determining
your future career.

2. In today’s day and age, content knowledge can be learnt at any time in the future. There are
online courses which enable you to learn anything you want, at any time and at any age.
However, you can only learn that content if you have a strong foundation of skills which are
needed for learning the content.
Over the next few weeks, we are going to de-construct the most popular IB subjects into the
content they cover, the transferable skills they instil and the career choices which most need
those transferable skills.