For example, if you'd like a career in curatorship, try to get experience working with museum collections. Use any opportunities to build up a network of contacts as well as provide the skills required for your chosen job. If you're looking for a career in a different area, such as banking or law, internships offer the chance for more structured work experience and are usually well advertised, making them easier to find. Competition for places is strong so research the company well before applying.
Search for placements and find out more about work experience and internships. History graduates are valued by a wide range of employers and organisations including heritage organisations, museums and libraries. Other typical employers include:. National and local government and the public services also attract history graduates, particularly the civil service with some graduates applying to the Civil Service Fast Stream , NHS management, the police and armed services.
Find information on employers in creative arts and design , public services and administration , teaching and education and other job sectors. Some history graduates go on to further study at Masters level in order to specialise in an area of history and cultures of interest to them.
However, many postgraduate courses accept graduates from any subject and this allows history graduates to enter careers as diverse as:. Courses of further study include the Graduate Diploma in Law GDL , one-year teacher training courses, Masters courses in information management and museum studies, and certificates in corporate finance and personnel practice.
For more information on further study and to find a course that interests you, see Masters degrees and search postgraduate courses in history. The top five jobs held by history graduates employed in the UK 15 months after graduation are marketing associate, secondary education teaching professional, sales and retail assistants, other admin occupations and HR.
They work with fossils, skeletons, art, books, and other artifacts, preparing them for research, exhibits, and proper storage when a collection is no longer on display. This is a great job for people who love museums and want to take a more hands-on approach to history. According to the U. If you're the type of person who fully embraces your career as a central part of your life, you might want to consider working as a living historian.
Living historians work at museums, fairs and historic sites to illustrate the past come to life. They often dress in period-specific clothing and perform everyday activities as people from that period typically would.
Living historians are different from historical reenactors. While reenactors recreate specific historical events like the Civil War, living historians portray the day-to-day life and activities of their chosen period in history and educate visitors in the process.
Talk about unique! Underwater archaeologists study and examine shipwrecks, sunken aircrafts, historical remains, and artifacts found in oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water. They also research once-inhabited areas that have become submerged after natural disasters. Depending on where your interests lie, you could be involved in the searches for wrecks and historical sites, deep-sea excavation, or artifact recovery, restoration, and conservation.
If your head says "history" but your heart says "theater," a career as a dramaturge could be the perfect way to combine your skills and interests.
Dramaturges work with playwrights and theater companies to research and adapt plays, ensuring they are culturally and historically correct and relevant.
This is a great job for history buffs who want to contribute to the art world as well. A dramaturge does not usually get a salary ; they often get a stipend instead. If you have an interest in studying the earth and how it interacts with other parts of the universe, this might be the job for you. You will be responsible for teaching physical and cultural phenomena. You might be able to teach at a college or work with a government agency. Writing and editing publications about history can be just as valuable and important as studying it.
As a historical writer, you can publish books, write articles, and edit other manuscripts that cover historical areas of which you have intimate knowledge. This valuable knowledge bank ensures that articles are interesting and well written as well as accurate. Becoming a writer often involves a college degree too, so you can put your B. The pay for a history writer varies dramatically by context: Some publications pay per article, while the salary for full-time positions will depend on the type, scope, frequency and size of the publication.
As a political scientist, you'd study political systems and their origins, process of development, and operations. You'd also study the way those pieces work together. While many political science jobs are in teaching and academia, there is a place for this position in the business world.
Government agencies often hire political scientists as well. How was this church or synagogue or mosque part of a larger pattern of religious thought, organization, or development in its time and place? To whom were these marketed and how successful was the campaign? How did it enter into competition against them?
How have its successful products changed over time, and what technologies or decision-making processes were used to make those changes? What was the internal or external economic or political climate which enabled those changes to succeed, or caused them to fail?
In answering such questions or solving specific historical problems, the second critical skill historians bring to the study of the past is the understanding that any historical problem or question has a larger context.
Historians are concerned with two types of context. The historical context addresses how a particular event or issue from the past was part of a chain of events, or how it fit into a web of connected issues specific to the time or place under consideration.
The historiographical context refers to the way earlier historians framed a problem or question about the past. History is produced by study and interpretation, so we can learn from the questions asked by our predecessors and by considering how the answers they provided shifted and changed over time. As a result of their interest in other nations, peoples, cultures, and times, historians spend a considerable amount of time reading accounts of the past written by others.
Often they come to be experts on the history of particular places and periods. As a result, all professional historians have learned how to use traditional information sources such as library reference tools and specialized bibliographies to search secondary sources —the vast literature of monographs, journal articles, and technical reports.
These tools allow them to identify sources that provide the basic contexts for a particular historical problem. Lately, historians are also using Internet sources and electronic databases.
Their general and specific knowledge of the past gives them the critical skills to evaluate the usefulness and reliability of these sources, and to select those most relevant to the historical puzzle they are seeking to solve.
However, most historical problems require more information than one can gain from existing historical studies. Historians utilize a third general skill to move from framing the questions and contexts to identifying, finding, and using primary sources.
These documents, or other materials produced by historical actors at the time in question, provide the raw materials that constitute the historical record. Guided by the questions posed and the contexts gathered from secondary sources, historians use their skills to select relevant information from an undifferentiated mass of primary source material and critically evaluate its reliability, accuracy, point of view, and possible connection to other information already gathered.
Traditionally, historians have been adept at the identification and use of written or textual primary sources, such as letters, diaries, government documents, and periodicals. They have learned how to use the complex tools or finding aids developed by librarians and archivists to locate the specific archival or manuscript collections whose undigested and often vast contents are most likely to have useful information relevant to the questions being raised.
Increasingly, historians are able to integrate written sources with information from other types of primary historical sources. They can locate, read, and analyze appropriate visual materials maps, paintings, engravings, and photographs , and they understand that landscapes and cityscapes are the result of human activity and thus have historical import.
Historians can also evaluate material culture, whether it is of buildings and structures or of small objects such as household goods, medical instruments, or clothing, as historical evidence about human activity. However, historians do not simply gather information and evidence from the past. The fourth essential skill of a professional historian is the ability to organize and communicate their insights to others in a convincing and accessible way.
Some historians share research through traditional written formats, such as books, articles, reports, and essays that require competency in writing a historical narrative or analysis. But for many other historians, the final product might be quite different.
It might be the script for a film or video documentary, the syllabus and assignments for a course, an oral argument about the significance of a historic place, the design for a museum exhibition, or a finding aid for a complex collection of modern political papers.
Into all of these products, historians infuse their cumulative understanding of historical contexts to the particular information at hand to communicate answers to historical questions. In addition to these general skills, historians may need to develop other skills specific to the institutions in which they work. Some skills, like the practice of oral history, are relevant to a variety of workplaces.
Archivists and local historical societies may carry out oral history projects to create new source materials for use by others consulting their collections. Museums may initiate an oral history project to engage their community with the issues, process, and purpose of a new exhibition.
Similarly, understanding of the special research and interpretive skills needed to evaluate visual materials, or material culture, will be useful to historians in educational institutions, museums, cultural resource management careers, and local or regional historical societies. Historians working in consulting firms or government agencies that deal with environmental issues may need knowledge of, and skills in, interpreting historic preservation laws and the technical ability to work with geographic information systems.
Historians working in archives and museums may need knowledge and skills related to the special preservation and conservation needs of the objects under their care. Those teaching history in the public schools or in universities may need special pedagogical skills.
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