What careers might hire a history PhD and what skills do I need?

June 22, 2021 5:49 PM

Like many recent humanities PhDs, I find myself overwhelmed at how ill-qualified I am for jobs outside academia, yet there are very few jobs within academia. What skills should I try to build over the next couple of years? General career ideas also welcome. (Many more details below the fold)

I'm lucky to be transitioning from being a teaching workhorse into a temporary but well funded position that will provide me with a fair bit of "free" time (that ostensibly is for producing scholarship). Plan A is to keep writing, publishing, and applying to tenure jobs, but as anyone in academia knows, there is a good chance I will never get a job. I'm fine with that honestly - but I'm worried about my alternate career prospects. So my plan is to also start building a Plan B resume, but I'm not sure what that should entail.

I've searched Metafilter, and there are a number of posts from PhDs seeking career advice, but they've generally got hard skills. Whereas I can only really claim to have soft skills. I don't have any quantitative research skills. I don't have expert knowledge in any computer programs, cannot code, and am generally tech adverse (though I'd happily learn a program if I needed to). I also can't claim to have all the skills that I imagine most people assume history PhDs have - I'm a slow reader, for example. And none of my language skills approach the fluency I'd imagine most jobs would require. Basically what I've got: classroom management, writing, editing, ability to analyze large amounts of information, archival research, experience collecting oral history. Please believe me what I say the topic of my research is very unlikely to help me get any jobs in the US. Lastly, I am not particularly detail oriented.

There are two prongs to this question - first, what entry-level jobs might I be able to get? And two, what skills will I need on my resume to be competitive? This last point is key for me, as a lot of "alt-ac" job advice I've seen will just suggest a career, but how one gets most careers is not intuitive to me. For example, a lot of people suggest "museums" but all the museum jobs I've seen either require years of experience or want a background in the specific topic/geography of the museum (and I don't specialize in American history, so that strikes me from the running from most museums in the US).

I'm open to most career suggestions, except consulting or anything super corporate. A lot of people suggest high school teaching to academics, but while I enjoy teaching college students, it's the motivated kids that make it fun, and I'm not particularly skilled at getting the unmotivated ones to care. Which I image would be a bigger problem K-12 (though feel free to tell me I'm wrong- my mom and many of her friends taught elementary school, so my sense of the job might be skewed). I don't care much about money, but I'd like to be at least lower-middle class. I'm more motivated to find work that is at least somewhat interesting - I find joy in learning new things, but I'm not picky about what I'm learning. The worst type of job for me would be one where every day is more or less the same. I'm happy to work independently or collectively, and a blend would be ideal. I don't mind working long-hours, but some work/life balance is preferred. I have been in school for so much of my life that I'm not keen to get another degree, but I'm not adverse to doing a short program that more or less guarantees you'll land a job.

Jobs I'd love but appear to be impossibly hard to get: museums, archives, libraries, and journalism/media. I've also somewhat soured on the idea of publishing, since it seems like you really need to be able to read fast.

To sum up (sorry this is so long), what are some practical jobs that might hire a 30-something with no professional experience, and what skills/computer programs should I try to acquire to be more competitive? Or what volunteer activities might I do to gain experience?

Thanks in advance - Metafilter contains such a wealth of experience.

posted by coffeecat to Work & Money (20 answers total)

Consider the built heritage field; I recently answered another asker's question, as did another heritage worker.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 6:17 PM on June 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

Call centers will hire nearly anyone. That sounds a bit judgmental, but it’s how I started my career. Try to avoid the high-turnover ones; small businesses and/or tech-adjacent are probably the best in terms of long term potential. If you can find one that works off email tickets instead of actual phone calls, so much the better. Not all that uncommon. Then once you’re there, pay attention to other roles in the organization and what skills they require, and gradually acquire them in between doing password resets.

Some tech-adjacent job titles that might be an option once you’ve got some experience are business analyst (that’s me!), project manager, support engineer, or quality assurance. None require coding ability, although it’s helpful. I describe my job by comparing it to poetry: my own poems are of the “roses are red” variety, but when I look at other people’s poems, I can understand meter, rhyme scheme, etc.

For programs, Excel is a good place to start. Nearly every company uses it, and consequently nearly every applicant lists it on their resume. But if you can actually demonstrate real expertise (e.g., pivot tables), that’ll give you an advantage. It will also really help you conceptualize how databases work, which is useful because something like SQL is pretty easy to learn and widely used. Some front end web stuff (HTML and basic CSS) is also something that comes in handy.

If you learn Quickbooks, you’ll not only be attractive to people looking for bookkeepers, but also to B2B software companies whose products include bookkeeping modules (which is a lot of them).

If you’d like to familiarize yourself with code (as opposed to trying to become a full-on engineer), take one of the free JavaScript classes from somewhere like Codecademy. All programming languages share the same basic principles, so which one you choose to learn isn’t really that important. JS is a good choice because a) it’s super widespread and still growing fast, and b) it’s executed in the web browser, meaning it works on pretty much every computer without needing to install anything special. You don’t necessarily have to get to a point where you’re comfortable writing code, but being able to talk about iterating over arrays or if-else logic is helpful.

If you can get access to Salesforce, a lot of enterprise software is just industry-specific CRM, and Salesforce is the ur-CRM.

I was a history B.A. before the call center-to-tech roller coaster, so I keep an eye out for other humanities people in tech. There are more than you’d think. One of my favorite former co-workers is a Philosophy ABD. But yeah, if you have questions, you’re welcome to MeMail me.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:21 PM on June 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

I know law and govt are two broad sectors history academics can go into. If you have any tenuous experience with those aspects of history and like the idea of the field, might be worth pursuing via reading, attending local meetings, etc.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:25 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

One possible option is to look for advising positions in a university. Some departments have them but pretty much all universities have them. It may look like a position way below your skill level but if you are good at it, there will be possibilities to move up into better paying positions with more responsibilities in administration.
posted by bluesky43 at 7:23 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I regularly let government contracts for work that involves historic research. Consulting firms, either big corporate shops or tiny boutique shops, hire historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists to research and evaluate the built environment (or archaeological sites) for the purposes of preservation, or other forms of cultural resources management.

I don't know if there's a lot of jobs in that field, but someone who is a good writer and communicator, efficient at research, and able to pick things up quickly--that kind of person is likely to do pretty well in environmental consulting. And I suspect there are more jobs in consulting than in academia...
posted by suelac at 7:30 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have a bunch of friends from grad school who went into university staff jobs--academic center coordinators, writing tutors, advising. Some of them have climbed pretty high on the food chain.
posted by goatdog at 7:40 PM on June 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Government jobs like foreign service or intelligence analysis, or private sector jobs like copy-editing or technical writer.
posted by Dansaman at 9:11 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

If you are interested in a job at a university, perhaps try to find a graduate assistant position in the department in which you would like to work? Try to find a student job that puts you in a position to meet those who would be supervising your desired professional job and would allow you to observe what people in that desired job actually do on a day-to-day basis.
posted by ASlackerPestersMums at 3:21 AM on June 23, 2021

What's your general topic? I am wondering if there aren't more soft skills in there (e.g. language skills or relevant topical expertise) than you realize. Academia is awful for making smart and talented people unaware of what they have to offer.

Agreed about government work above, especially federal work. Trump truly emptied the federal bureaucracy of staff. As an example, if you're anywhere near migration or have Spanish, I'd say to look into RAIO in USCIS (The refugee corps is hiring for sure) and/or the Office of Refugee Resettlement in HHS (because even if they're not hiring now...they'll have to soon).

Warning: Sooo many former PhDs try to go in too low. Choose the appropriate level to make yourself competitive. As a PhD, don't go for anything lower than a GS-9, and you'll qualify for GS-10 or GS-11 easily iirc.
posted by migrantology at 4:35 AM on June 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

The world of non-profits is bigger and wider than most of us realize. Many of them have missions that require a historical perspective, and many have tricky "edge case" issues that require getting consensus from a number of different players. History is as good a background as anything else sometimes.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:32 AM on June 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's a very different field, but I work in marketing/advertising and know quite a few people in my field with postgraduate history degrees.

If you have experience conducting research from primary sources, synthesizing diverse sources of information into single outputs, conducting fieldwork and teaching classes that maps very well onto the ad agency world as a strategist, researcher or even copywriter. And LOL so many people in the industry are horrible with details.

Also (as far as I've seen) advertising can be more open to people from "non-traditional" work backgrounds than other fields.
posted by huskerdont at 7:48 AM on June 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

In terms of museums, the job market can be tight, and pay can also be on the low side, depending on where you are located. Museum education departments are probably one avenue you could potentially explore? There are online museum studies certificate courses that can help people make a career transition; example of one at Northwestern. There are also graduate certificate programs in public history available at various universities. You can do some delving into resources on the American Alliance of Museums page.
posted by gudrun at 8:32 AM on June 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have a bunch of friends from grad school who went into university staff jobs--academic center coordinators, writing tutors, advising.

Also, if you get on staff in a university system, most of them allow staff the same (or similar) borrowing privileges as faculty at the library, so you can continue to do your research as you continue to apply for academic jobs.
posted by eclectist at 9:33 AM on June 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

There's nothing inherently wrong with investing a day or two in hanging a shingle on the web and sending some emails to let people at local higher ed institutions know you are hireable for short-term contracts for writing -- grant applications, research reports, short articles, etc. I work in university marcomms and while I don't have a ton of need in my shop for marketing/journalism writing directly per se, there's a lot of floating needs for writers. There's never enough capacity on staff for research-support writing, and a lot of weird little marginal budgets written into grants for "knowledge promulgation," etc. If you can build a bit of a rep as a reliable, high quality writer in the research support space... those jobs come up, and it's hard to find people with the right skillset to fill them.
posted by Shepherd at 9:42 AM on June 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

My wife has a PhD in history and now works in academic advising for a large university. She gets bored by it and really misses teaching, but as far as jobs go it is a good job.
posted by Lutoslawski at 11:59 AM on June 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for all the suggestions so far - just to clarify (as it's come up a couple of times), I'm not a graduate student - I finished a couple years ago - so student jobs aren't an option right now. But I have, say, 8hrs a week to throw into learning programs, earning certificates, or doing odd jobs/gigs (like those suggested by Shepherd above) to build a side resume.
posted by coffeecat at 12:38 PM on June 23, 2021

I mean you could consider the history PhD a sunk cost, and start from the question of 'what job do I want and how do I get there'. You could be a yoga instructor or a paramedic or an electrician or a hairdresser or a chef etc. As an ex-academic I am familiar with the idea that one has to stay in an academicish job "or else" but like... it's not true. You don't have to spend your life dealing with words and abstractions; you could use your hands and your body too. Maybe you have some interests you could develop?
posted by PercussivePaul at 5:33 PM on June 23, 2021

A lot of people suggest high school teaching to academics, but while I enjoy teaching college students, it's the motivated kids that make it fun, and I'm not particularly skilled at getting the unmotivated ones to care.

One of the traditional answer to this genre of question was teaching in private high schools, where they are both often more flexible about formal teaching credentials, and where dealing with problem students is less a feature of the job.
posted by kickingtheground at 9:49 PM on June 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't have a PhD, but I did major in history. You need to apply to the jobs you want, including dream jobs, and listen carefully if you make it to the interview stage ("we really like you, but we're looking for someone with more...") and make it clear that they should keep you in mind if a good fit comes up. I would second Shepherd's advice, but aim for where you want to land. I say this as someone who knows it is possible.
posted by history is a weapon at 3:53 PM on June 24, 2021

You might want to read the book "So What Are You Going to Do with That?": Finding Careers Outside Academia. It thoughtfully focuses on your situation.
posted by mortaddams at 6:30 PM on June 26, 2021