Obligatory "I am not a professor," and I'm sure some of the actual faculty on this sub can provide more details about their actual career paths. However, I got far enough along the path toward trying to be a professor before leaving grad school because it's a bad idea.

Do you need a degree in education?

No. Unlike primary and secondary school teachers, post-secondary/university professors typically don't have any formal educational training at all. Most universities require a PhD in the relevant field of study, though some community colleges in the US or universities in more under-served countries will hire faculty with just a Master's degree. This is arguably to the detriment of everyone involved in most case, but that's the way it is. In part, this is simply inertia of a very old system, but also partly because to get to the PhD most people are 3+ degrees and 9+ years deep into post-secondary education already.

Most PhD programs will require students to spend some time as a teacher's assistant or research assistant working with one of their professors. However, that can range anywhere from just doing busy work like test design and grading to teaching a whole introductory level class on your own. Some programs will offer a pedagogy class while working on the PhD, which is focused on best teaching practices in the specific field. However, that is not always required or even offered by many universities.

Where is the best country to become a history professor?

I'm mostly familiar with the US, but have a bit of experience with the UK system and friends who got their degrees or work in other countries (mostly European). There are pros and cons to every system. Unsurprisingly, the so-called "First World" tends to have the best universities, pay, and working environment for their faculty. European countries often have better labor protections for faculty and PhD candidates alike. The US has the benefit of a truly absurd number universities and colleges, providing a larger job market. The progression from BA to PhD in the UK is a bit faster than other countries at the cost of putting more responsibility for funding on the students, whereas most worthwhile PhD programs in the US pay their students a nominal stipend.

How long would it take?

I sort of addressed this above, but to elaborate: PhD programs themselves typically lasts about 3-5 years. Some of those programs accept people with a bachelor's degree, and students earn a Master's in the first 2 years. Others only accept students who already have their MA, meaning you have to do a separate MA first, typically 2 years. Of course, all of this is only after a 3-4 year Bachelor's program. Many universities offer a joint Master's program that can be tacked on for 1 year after the regular BA program and shave a little time off of this whole track. So it's a grand total 7-11 years on average, depending on your exact educational experience and country.

When you become a history professor, do you pick one field to specialize in?

When you get a PhD, you pick one field to get very specialized in. A PhD thesis/dissertation is supposed to be a completely original piece of research, which leads to hyper-specialization in one very precise part of the field for most of a PhD candidate's research. Frankly, many programs stear students toward some level of specialization much earlier in the process too, sometimes as early as the initial BA.

However, when you're actually hired as a professor, it's almost certainly a less specialized position than your actual PhD program and continuing research outside of teaching. In a large history department, a professor may just teach classes that are largely related to their speciality (eg a Roman Imperial Economy specialist teaching about ancient economics in general and the whole history of ancient Rome). In a smaller department, a professor may be asked to cover a much wider range of classes (eg a First Crusade historiography specialist teaching all pre-modern history from Ancient Greece to late-medieval Spain).

To be a history professor, you would have to have a Ph.D. in history. This takes about 5-7 years, depending on the program and other factors (whether you started with an M.A. or not, etc.). You have a couple of years of coursework followed by exams in your major field(s), and usually some other hoops to jump through (language exams if you're in a non-Anglophone field, etc.). Then you write a dissertation proposal, get that approved, and write your dissertation, which can take several years, since you're producing a work of original scholarship that will likely be in the 300 page range.

Then you defend that dissertation, graduate, and find out that you wasted those 5-7 years, because there are no jobs. This is why you should not get a Ph.D. in history. The academic job market cratered after the financial crisis in 2008, made a partial recovery, and then cratered again after the pandemic and the 2020 and 2022 recessions, and those jobs are not coming back.

The reason those jobs aren't coming back is that history enrollments are declining across the board, reducing the need for history faculty, which means fewer faculty are hired, which means there are no jobs, which discourages people from majoring in history, which causes enrollments to decline...and the cycle repeats itself. When tenured professors retire, most universities aren't replacing them with new tenure-track hires; they're either replacing them with adjuncts and non-tenured faculty, or farming them out to grad students, or just forcing their existing professors to teach more classes. As a result, there are no jobs.

The fact that there are no jobs is further compounded by the fact that, in the US at least, universities have been overproducing history Ph.D.s for years. Most years, there are three or four times as many new Ph.D.s as there are open teaching jobs, and only a fraction of those jobs will be in your field. This long period of overproduction has created a huge backlog of un/underemployed Ph.D.s who are also applying for those jobs, so almost every job gets literally hundreds of applicants. Your chances of getting an interview aren't that great, much less actually getting a job. I applied for 125 jobs the year I finished my Ph.D., and I got three interviews and two job offers (only one of which was a teaching job, and that wasn't even full time). Over half of the tenure-track jobs that still exist go to graduates of the top 10 programs, leaving scraps behind for everyone else, so if you can't get into one of those top 10 programs, your chances decline further still. Most people who get Ph.D.s these days either end up leaving academia or scraping by as an adjunct and living hand to mouth with no benefits or financial security.

Not only are you unlikely to be able to get a teaching job, but that Ph.D. also becomes an albatross around your neck as you try to escape academia. Those 5-7 years that you spent in school getting a degree that won't help you are a glaring gap in your resume and put you at a serious disadvantage compared to people in your age cohort that went to work after college, because they've spent that time saving for houses/children/retirement/whatever and you've got basically no savings because you've only been earning a paltry graduate student stipend. The opportunity cost of getting a Ph.D. is very large, and the potential payoff is very small. I really can't recommend strongly enough that you do not go down this career path, because it's completely unviable in 2022.

In the United States, at least, the ticket to a job in academia teaching history at the college level is the Ph.D. in history. There are some colleges where one can teach history with a Master's degree (in history), but for a permanent position teaching history at a university that is at least decent, a doctorate is a basic requirement. Degrees in education are really for people teaching at the pre-university level, although they have their own inherent value and could always supplement additional education specifically in history.

A doctoral program in history in the U.S. usually takes 5-7 years to complete. You would, in almost all cases, choose a field of specialization before beginning doctoral studies. At the best American universities, e.g., the expectation is that you would be matched with a mentor working within your field of interest who would both advise and, to some extent, direct your course of study. The first 3-4 years of study would be dedicated to coursework and meeting qualifications milestones like oral exams (and sometimes written exams) to demonstrate a base level of competence in the area you've chosen to study. The remaining time would be spent researching and writing the dissertation -- an original work of research on a topic not previously published in the field. In most doctoral programs in history, there is an expectation that you will conduct research in archives, which often entails extensive travel. Moreover, there is the expectation that you will continue to produce high-quality historical research once you have a faculty position, including (perhaps international) travel as part of that process. (Indeed, grant writing becomes a major focus for historians, particularly in their apprenticeships.)

All that said, it is currently much more difficult to find a permanent position (i.e., one in which you would be rewarded with tenure -- the ability to stay in the same position until you retire) in the United States. A perfect storm of slashed funding, decreased admissions and enrollment, etc., has resulted in faculty positions in the humanties and social sciences reaching all time lows. To give you some insight, I'm currently a Master's student at a top 20 history program in the U.S. The cohort of doctoral students who began study at the same time that I enrolled are extremely talented, very bright people. But I would be shocked if more than two ended up with tenure track positions once their doctorates are finished. Most, in addition, came into the doctoral program already having earned Master's degrees. I think of the ten students, all but two came in with Master's degrees and/or some work experience. Presumably, this additional experience gave these particular students an edge in what was an extremely competitive admissions process.

Whether the system is better in other countries is a question I'm not qualified to answer, although I will say that, to some extent, the answer will be subjective. I'm sure there are plusses and minuses, including what their own job markets look like. The doctoral education system also have inherent differences, as do their tenure systems, where they exist.

The American Historical Society has online resources that explain much of these process in great detail, so if you're considering studying in the U.S., I'd recommend researching the topic more there: https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/professional-life

Retired American History PhD here (age 65). My area of study was Native American and Frontier history. As such, I obtained work as a researcher for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, taught a variety of courses outside my specialization (Ancient Greece, Rome, Western Civ offerings), and engaged heavily in research, writing, and publication.

Remember: A PhD is a research degree, and most colleges and universities worthy of the name encourage (require) publishing. “Publish or Perish”, though at jr college level not so much.

I chose as my minor fields courses that allowed me later to teach. Thus, when starting out as a new prof, I made myself valuable by being able to teach a number of offerings outside of my specialty.

Length of time it took me: 4 years for a B.A., 2 years for a M.A., 5 years more for the PhD, for a total of 11 years. I took the degrees back to back to back with no time off.

Worst part of the PhD program for me: two foreign language requirements. I passed them both, but I am sure I impressed no one who graded it!

Most embarrassing moment as a professor: In my very first year in a tenure track assistant professor, I taught an American Indian class that had about 75 students in it. The classroom was twice as long as it was wide, so anyone using the it would wear a wireless mic to broadcast through the room’s speakers. One day when I arrived a few minutes early, I donned the mic but then got called back to the office down the hall. On my way back to the classroom I stopped by the public bathroom. When I returned, I found 75 students in delirious laughter: Turns out my remote microphone picked up every sound in the bathroom and broadcast it back to the students.