Employability is, when you get right down to it, about enhancing your ability to find a job, secure it, and succeed in it. You shouldn’t neglect any of these aspects as your develop your employability skills during your degree, and this page is intended to help with the first part.
Finding a job and a career after your degree
Finding a job, especially a graduate-level job that might lead to a career, is a daunting task, that requires patience, determination, and a particular combination of skills and knowledge that differs drastically depending on the industry or sector you’re interested in.
Unavoidably, you are going to spend a lot of time researching companies and industries, in addition to undertaking work experience and internships to stand out from the crowd. Oftentimes, the research you will be doing is finding out what jobs exist in your chosen field, as well as the employers you’d most like to work for.
Fortunately, there is a huge range of information out there to make your search more efficient. The Careers and Employability Service’s website on job-hunting is a deep well of information, and will help you use your time wisely. You can also book an appointment with a Careers Advisor for detailed, individual advice and support on your prospects and options.
Below is a video of a talk given by Jenny Keaveney, a Careers Advisor in the CES, on the various career options open to History and Military History students. This video is a good starting point if you haven’t yet settled on the career you would like, and will also help you if you have an idea and would like to know how to explore it further.
Graduate job listings
- The CES’ vacancies database is a depository for hundreds of graduate jobs, as well as work experience placements and long-term internships.
- Prospects.ac.uk is one of the largest graduate job vacancy databases in the country, and boasts an extremely useful matching questionnaire, helping to find jobs and sectors that might suit your skills and interests.
- TARGETjobs hosts a range of internships and graduate jobs.
- Milkround+ claims to be “the UK’s most widely used student and graduate job website.”
- The Graduate Recruitment Bureau has representatives on-campus to help you identify the jobs open to you before your graduate.
- The CES’s website also contains a list of graduate recruitment agencies working in specific fields.
Finding a job in…
While a history degree equips you to undertake a vast range of jobs in the future, there are some that are of particular interest in history graduates. As such, this page will be updated regularly with profiles on finding work in certain sectors.