This is not an actual history questions but its about historian as job (and i dont know where i can ask). I am in my last year in school and considering to take history in university. I would love to study history more, but the problem i have is that i really dont know what to do after an eventual degree in history. So basically, what are the job possibilities?
Plenty!
Teaching is the obvious choice (and is what I’m currently doing, although that’s ESL teaching and not teaching teaching but anyway). Don’t know which country you’re in but I know in the UK you need to finish your degree, and then do a PGCE to be able to teach and bob’s your uncle, your sorted.
Some of my friend’s at Uni went to go into journalism. I think one of them does it part time alongside his PhD (doctorate in history is also an option) and the other went into it full time.
Some of my other friends joined the police force and applied for work at places like MI5.
Basically, because of how a history degree works, you learn a lot of techniques in how to successfully do research and make an argument, which are very transferable skills.
Once I finish my teaching job here, I plan on using that argument to try and get a job with the Foreign Office doing policy analysis.
I hope this helped!
Lots of people I went to school with went on to become university professors - if you end up continuing on with history into grad school, I suppose that's everyone's dream (but it's pretty unlikely since there just aren't enough jobs for everyone).
For me and others who didn't go that route, we've ended up in lots of other jobs: translators (like me!), working for publishing companies (in academic or popular presses, as editors or salespersons), novelists, journalists, lawyers, priests, politicians, librarians, working in museums (curators or guides), elementary/high school teachers, musicians, therapists, economists, some people joined the military, and probably lots of other things that I'm forgetting.
Basically you can do lots of things with a history degree because it's not really about learning a bunch of names and dates. That's fun too (at least for me), but you'll also be learning how to read critically, to analyze information, to determine good sources and bad sources of information, to write persuasively, maybe even some public speaking skills. That kind of knowledge is applicable to all sorts of jobs, even if they don't seem like they have anything to do with history.