Impactful jobs for business degree graduates 

Considering a business degree, currently studying, or already graduated? This guide will take you through some of the most promising career paths you could enter with a background in business.

These aren’t just any careers. At Probably Good, we believe your career is one of the most significant opportunities you have to make a positive difference. With this in mind, in this article, we’ll explore some of the most impactful careers where a business degree can open doors and potentially offer unique advantages.

For-profit entrepreneurship

For-profit entrepreneurs found ventures that make a profit for owners and investors. It’s a challenging role that requires taking on various responsibilities, such as budgeting, marketing, sales, and product creation.

Some specific responsibilities include:

• Taking on all aspects of starting and running a business, including budgeting, marketing, sales, and creating your product. 
• Raising funds, most commonly by finding and pitching to potential investors, as well as maintaining relationships with investors.
• As the business grows, founders will generally take on more managerial responsibilities such as supervising employees, ramping up hiring, and directing company strategy.

Though there are no formal qualifications needed to become an entrepreneur, a business degree will unsurprisingly serve as a great starting point. A business degree will help equip you with the fundamental skills for starting and running a business, such as finance, marketing, and management.

You’ll still have a lot to learn through experience, but pursuing a business degree is likely one of the best subjects you can take if you want to become a for-profit entrepreneur.

How much impact could you have?

Some people within for-profit entrepreneurship have been able to achieve an enormous amount of good. There are two main ways that for-profit entrepreneurs can have a big impact:

First, they can provide products and services that directly help people. Getting the right product or service into the marketplace could produce the kind of impact many might not expect from companies, like saving lives, improving people’s health and quality of life, providing and improving education, and helping people to escape poverty. Our full career profile on for-profit entrepreneurship gives more examples of positive impact. 

Alternatively, they can aim to generate money to donate toward effective causes and pressing problems. Donating millions to highly effective organizations can achieve a lot of good, like helping the global poor, improving the welfare of animals, or even helping to protect against catastrophic risks like pandemics and the effects of climate change.

However, the road to success in for-profit entrepreneurship is full of challenges. Research suggests 90% of tech startups fail completely, and that only 1.5% of companies reach a successful exit of over $50 million. 

For-profit entrepreneur salary

The salary of a for-profit entrepreneur is highly dependent on the success of the business – and you’ll be able to set your own salary (though you may be accountable to investors). The most successful founders can make truly enormous amounts of money (which you could give away to have a huge impact!).

However, founders often pay themselves relatively little in the early years of a business in order to help their business. And, because of the high failure rates, many founders might not make very much at all, and might often lose money if they invest their own funds. So, for those less comfortable with risk, pursuing other business-related careers may be a safer option.

Getting started in for-profit entrepreneurship

Here are a few practical ideas for actions you can take now to test your personal fit and upskill for entrepreneurship.

• Prioritize finding a great co-founder. Though solo founders can be successful, it’s generally considered best practice to found your startup with someone else who complements the skills and experience you bring to the table. 
• Incubators and accelerators. One sought-after way to make your startup successful is to go through a startup incubator or accelerator. These are organizations dedicated to guiding new companies to profitability. The most prestigious incubators have a strong track record in identifying and developing highly successful companies. See, for example, this list of the top ten accelerators ranked by their successful exits. 
• Acquire venture capital. Startups typically acquire funding to scale up by pitching themselves to venture capital funds. There are a huge number of these, but some that explicitly focus on funding impact-oriented companies include Fifty Years and Deep Science Ventures – you can find a large list of other impact-focused VC funds here.

People management

People management involves managing others – whether that’s managing their tasks and responsibilities, keeping them motivated and value-aligned, providing whatever is necessary for them to perform their job effectively, and more.

People management isn’t a separate “job” or career path per se, because management duties are often tied to seniority and expertise in different career paths. Because of this, you’ll usually need specific experience in whichever career path you take a management job in. 

The daily tasks of a people manager might include:

• Meeting with employees to check on progress and form schedules.
• Hiring new staff and assisting with their training and onboarding. 
• Setting your team’s priorities and strategies.
• Navigating potential performance issues and supporting staff, as well as mentoring them and helping them to develop. 
• Setting goals and tracking progress.

Though it’s unlikely you’ll be able to take a management position immediately after a bachelor’s degree, business degrees are likely among the best subjects or majors for gaining management skills and learning best management practices as an undergraduate. Many business degrees, especially those specializing in business management, offer distinct courses on an array of the components involved in management.

How much impact could you have?

People management can let you help people at a really large scale and have lots of positive impact – if you find the right opportunity. 

One reason people management can lead to impact is by working as a multiplier for the impact of others – particularly good managers seem to be able to increase the overall productivity of the team under them, sometimes by dozens of percentage points. If you’re in an organization that’s already doing lots of good (for example, an evidence-led nonprofit working in global health and development), this productivity increase could achieve huge amounts of impact.

Managers can also help an organization grow. Management is often a limiting factor in the number of employees who can be hired, so having more managers (even if they’re only passable) can help an organization to have more impact by increasing the number of people working there.

However, the impact of a people manager is highly dependent on the organization they’re in. Even a great manager might not be able to make a significant difference if they’re in a team that’s not working towards an important or useful goal.

Because of this, it’s crucial to look for organizations that are focused on pressing problems where lots of impact can be had, and that are deploying effective solutions to these problems.

People management salaries

Because people managers can work in any industry and organization and at different levels of seniority, salaries will vary much more than in other jobs. The average salaries in specific industries are likely a better guide to salaries in this path than the average salaries of all people managers. However, management jobs tend to be senior positions, and so may often command a higher salary than the industry average. 

It’s worth bearing in mind that at least some of the most impactful people manager jobs may be in nonprofit organizations, which tend to have lower salaries than other organization types.

Getting started in people management

Here are a few practical ideas for actions you can take now to test your personal fit and upskill for people management.

• Excel at your role. Justifiably or not, most industries tend to promote strong individual contributors into management, so performing well in your non-management roles can significantly improve your chances of getting a management position.
• Try to reach great managers and mentors. Learning from people with experience is important in management, whether you do that by seeing them in action or asking for advice. Try to seek role models that support your goal of becoming a manager and are willing to invest in teaching you (or at least providing some guidance).
• Identify informal opportunities for management. Try persuading your peers to help out with an exciting project at work, volunteer to manage an informal project such as a fundraiser, or ask for permission to spend part of your time on a project you initiate (and will hopefully someday lead).
• Consider the option of getting an MBA. In some industries, this can be helpful, though we’d highly recommend checking with managers familiar with your context on whether this is a good choice for you.

Other relevant careers

The careers explored above are ones that may be particularly advantageous or impactful to explore for people with degrees or majors in business. Here, we’ll give a couple of quick extra examples of careers that may also be a good fit.

Nonprofit entrepreneurship

Nonprofit entrepreneurship is the founding of new nonprofits with the goal of solving important problems. Some specific tasks and responsibilities include:

• Any of the activities involved in creating and running a nonprofit, including administrative tasks, hiring and onboarding employees, and directing the organization’s strategy. 
• Raising funds, primarily from foundations and individual donors. 
• Build and maintain partnerships with external bodies such as government agencies, NGOs, and funders.

A business degree is a great background for nonprofit entrepreneurship for much the same reasons we gave in favor of for-profit entrepreneurship. Because a business degree will teach a range of skills relevant to running an organization, including finance, accounting, marketing, and management – it’s likely you’ll come out of a business degree with a good basis for further developing the skills needed for this career path.

If you have the potential to be a great founder, then we think starting a nonprofit can be one of the most impactful options available to you, especially if you’re focused on making evidence-based decisions in high-priority cause areas.

Some founders of effective nonprofits have been able to achieve a truly massive impact, like saving thousands of lives through deploying effective solutions to large-scale problems (read our full nonprofit entrepreneurship career profile for some inspiring examples!). 

However, this path is highly demanding to succeed in, requiring a number of particular traits, like an exceptional amount of determination and resilience. It’s also quite high-risk – many organizations don’t work out as intended, meaning you can end up having little to show for all your hard work.

Grantmaker

Grantmakers help to decide where philanthropic funds and foundations spend their money, either by evaluating applications from organizations seeking grants or by actively searching for potentially promising grant recipients. Grantmakers often have other administrative duties related to their grants, for instance, monitoring the expenditure of grant money and ensuring it is spent appropriately by the organizations they fund.

The finance skills you’ll gain in a business degree could help you better understand the financial needs of organizations. This is a valuable insight to have as the person who’ll be making important funding decisions.

In some ways, the skill set that underpins grantmaking isn’t dissimilar from investment decisions. Though instead of optimizing for financial return, you’re instead trying to generate social impact.

On top of this, the various management and administrative skills you’ll pick up may also help to better judge whether an organization is well-run or not, which can play an important part in deciding whether to approve a grant decision. 

However, grantmakers generally also need expertise and experience in the areas they’re making grants in, especially at larger foundations. Because of this, you’ll likely need to spend time working in a field or cause area before you can take a grantmaking position, rather than a job you can take immediately after your bachelor’s. 

How does business compare to other degrees?

A bachelor’s in business, business administration, or business management will help you gain several transferable skills that can help you with a range of different careers. Here are some of the skills you’ll get with a business degree:

• Management: Business degrees – particularly those that focus on business management – will teach you various management skills, both in terms of the practicalities of running an organization and in the best practices for managing people.
• Financial literacy: By studying business, you’ll gain an understanding of financial concepts, such as budgeting, forecasting, and accounting, and how to apply them at the organizational level.
• Marketing skills: Business degrees typically teach marketing concepts, which will help you devise and execute marketing plans that can help an organization attract more potential customers, or in the nonprofit sector, potential donors.
• Strategic thinking: A business degree will help you think about organizations as a whole, and how the different elements of an organization must come together to reach a shared vision.

It’s worth noting, however, that a business degree likely won’t give you skills that can be important within specific cause areas or more specialized career paths. These are quite general skills–if you have a specific view of the sorts of problems you want to solve, it can be a better idea to study something more specific that’ll give you credibility in those fields. Highly technical people can often turn their hand to entrepreneurship–but the other way around is more difficult.

Expanding your options

It’s important to note that this is just a small selection of the careers that you’ll be in a good position to pursue with a degree in business. These are careers that we think have a potential for high positive impact and personal fulfillment, and your degree will put you in a good place to pursue these kinds of jobs.

However, don’t feel limited by these options. Careers are flexible and often take unexpected directions. Your degree will provide a great first step for the jobs discussed in this article, but your true list of options is much larger than it might seem.

In fact, most graduates (as many as 74%) go into careers unrelated to their degree subject or major. Because of this, it’s well worth keeping an open mind and exploring other paths, too, even if they don’t immediately seem relevant to your education.

What should you do next?

Here are a few suggestions for steps you can take next to plan your career and find great opportunities.

• Read our career advice series for a step-by-step guide on building a career that’s good for you and the world.
• Find great job opportunities on our high-impact job board and explore great internships and fellowships.
• See our career profiles for a full list of impactful careers that we’ve researched.
• Consider applying to our free 1-1 advising service, where we can give you helpful, tailored career advice.