Absolutely - at least at the university level. In fact, the development of your communication skills is probably one of the key benefits of pursuing an education in historical studies at an undergraduate level.

One of the common criticisms levied against humanities courses - History included - is that they have a limited vocational component to them. STEM subjects seem much more immediately useful if you are going to university primarily as an exercise in boosting your employability and accessing supposedly 'better' jobs; there are more jobs where you can directly apply the specialist knowledge you acquire from a Chemistry degree than you can a History degree, that's for certain. But undergraduate education isn't just about teaching you a specialist subject or training potential future academics - it's also about giving you transferable skills that you can bring with you to the workplace and your daily life.

A good History programme will definitely develop your communication skills. As a course that focuses on written assessment, you will obviously - hopefully - learn how to structure and present written material in a way that is engaging. But there are other benefits to writing essay after essay for a History degree, as well. When instructors are asking you to write sourced responses to an essay question, they're trying to do more than just get you to show what you've learnt about a particular time period or subject matter. They're also teaching you how to undertake secondary and primary research and present your findings in a concise, engaging way; to collect vast quantities of information, identify the relevant points, and make a powerful argument in a limited amount of space. This is a skill that is hugely valuable in the private, public and charitable sectors. In a similar way, independent research exercises help to teach you the basic principles of project design and management.

The practical skills that go into writing a quality History essay are also enormously valuable for non-historical research tasks, management reports, project proposals and a wide variety of other kind of documents you might find yourself being asked to produce in a professional job. Being able to convey information in a reasonable succinct way without losing anything important is hugely useful for getting your ideas heard in the workplace. Tutors will tell you that there is usually a significant gulf in quality between a first and final year undergraduate's writing unless they completely fail to apply themselves, and if you go on to postgraduate study, I can virtually guarantee that re-reading your undergraduate dissertation will be a painful exercise because you will suddenly realise all of the other things you now feel you should have done.

And whilst the focus of any undergraduate History course is always going to be on the development of your written communication, there are definitely opportunities to develop your verbal communication skills, too. A good programme should include assessment - either formative or summative - orientated around presentation and ideally, even (by your final year) basic teaching skills. Seminars where you discuss reading material and lecture content in small groups are as much about encouraging you to grow your confidence and learn to articulate ideas as they are about deepening your understanding of a subject under the guidance of an expert. If you make the most of them, then they are extremely valuable for helping you get an understanding of what it's like to be a professional that involves doing a lot of work with other people in problem-solving or planning meetings. In the UK, History has long been seen as a popular starting point for going into a legal or public sector career because the practical skills learnt translate extremely well into working in law or government.

None of this is accidental. You should notice that undergraduate marking schemes pay particular attention to things like communication and ability to present information, not just depth or breadth of knowledge. The people who design undergraduate programmes are well aware that the majority of their students will not want to pursue a career in academia and that they need to find ways to use the discipline to equip them with transferable skills for the professional world. Universities around the world are under pressure to show that their graduates have good employment opportunities across the board, regardless of the subject they study. Whilst STEM subjects do fare significantly better in their post-graduation employment rate according to research by the UK Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services, History graduates show a remarkable diversity in the kind of professional work they do, and this reflects the practical skill development that a History education gives you (and whilst History performs poorest in post-graduation employment in six months, its graduates are also the highest paid of all the humanities on average; the poor performance on employment may simply reflect that without an obvious vocation to go into, the average graduate just takes longer to find work than in a vocational degree).

Now, this is all at the university level and based on the British experience. Nonetheless, I think it's safe to say that if you apply yourself to a university education in historical studies, you will find enormous benefit to your communication skills - as well as a host of other valuable skills.