What does ‘industry’ mean if you’re a humanities PhD?

‘Society needs more, not fewer, people […] who can read, critique, and synthesise complex and competing arguments.’
– Katina L. Rogers, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work

When I was coming towards the end of my English Lit PhD in 2011, there was very little ‘academia to industry’ chat happening. Had there been, I envision that I may have spent a lot of time shouting things at the sky like:

• I don’t have an ‘industry!’
• My research doesn’t have ‘industrial applications!’
• WHAT DOES INDUSTRY EVEN MEAN FOR ME

and other such woes. Now I wear the career adviser hat, the temptation is to answer this question – what does ‘industry’ mean for humanities PhDs – with something encouraging like ‘anything you want it to be! You can turn your skills to ALL KINDS of things…!’ However, that doesn’t really help if you’re already feeling daunted or overwhelmed by the nebulous sprawl that is your potential post-PhD future.

So, with my penchant for trying to classify the unclassifiable, here’s an attempt to put some order on things. To not be absolutely exhaustive, by any means, but to give some feasible ideas as to what moving to ‘industry’ from the academic humanities might look like, with the hope that it makes things seem just a bit more tangible if you’re stuck with woes listed above.

Applications of your subject knowledge ‘to industry’

This option feels so much more common for people from STEM. You do an analytical chemistry PhD, you go on to be an analytical chemist ‘in industry.’ You study material science, you become a material scientist ‘in industry.’ As someone whose PhD was in the narrative role of abandoned spaces in novels, I was fascinated by the fact that some of my STEM pals could move into an ‘industry’ job that had pretty much exactly the same name as what they’d done in academia.

Considering the destinations of humanities PhD graduates from my university over the past 5 years, examples of roles that we might put under this category are:

• Archaeologist
• Heritage consultant
• Applied linguist in government department/ intelligence service
• Roman coin curator
• Inspector of ancient monuments

If the name of your academic subject area appears in a job title, like in these examples, then there’s one obvious option. However, I guess the whole point of this post is the fact that this is heavily dependent on the transferability of your subject area to other sectors. For example, Indeed.com certainly isn’t awash with ‘industry’ job postings for Athenian Rhetoric specialists (though how I wish it was). So, if your subject area doesn’t directly ‘translate’ into an ‘industry’ equivalent, what’s next on the list?

Organisations that undertake, support, and/or advocate for humanities research

This category has several guises, the first of which could be linked your academic subject. Here, I’m thinking of things like membership societies attached to a particular academic fields. The Historical Association, The Egypt Exploration Society… those kinds of bodies who might hold conferences and events in your subject area, produce resources for people working within that subject area, and so on. Admittedly, when it comes to the humanities, some of these associations might be very small, with nothing on the size of some of their STEM counterparts like the Royal Society of Chemistry or the Institute of Physics. Nonetheless, some of the larger ones still employ people to run their programmes, events, and day-to-day business.

The next batch I’m putting in this category are national-level organisations that champion the humanities, and advocate the role the humanities play in society. In the UK, for example, we have The British Academy, which (amongst many other things) promotes the benefits of arts, humanities and social sciences research, and works to apply insights from these areas to policy issues ‘for public benefit and societal wellbeing.’ In the US there’s the National Humanities Center which similarly ‘promotes understanding of the humanities and advocates for their foundational role in a democratic society.’ I’ve worked with several PhD researchers who have moved into roles with such organisations (especially with the British Academy), including roles focused on policy, programme management, and event management.

Another role of the organisations I just mentioned is funding humanities research, which leads us onto the next manifestation of this part of the humanities ‘industry.’ Again my knowledge is somewhat UK-centric here, but bodies like the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Leverhulme Trust who fund humanities research also employ people in roles such as Grants Officers/ Managers, Partnership Management, and Research Communication, to name a few. Getting a sense of who funds research in your field and then nosying at the roles done by employees of these organisations on LinkedIn can give you an idea of the work that goes on there.

Finally, a further manifestation of this category comes in something that I only know to describe as ‘Independent Research Organisations.’ In the UK, for example, these organisations comprise the larger national libraries, archives, museums, heritage organisations, and other cultural organisations who are recognised by the AHRC as research institutions that are not affiliated with universities, but that are eligible to apply for funding from research councils, either independently or in collaboration with universities. I’m not 100% sure about equivalents in other countries, but you could look up any external collaborators on research projects in your field, or look at records from humanities research funders in your country to see what they’ve funded and if any recipients have been organisations other than academic institutions. Because these organisations support and undertake humanities research, they not only sometimes hire into research roles, but also into roles that involve managing research and building links with academia. One super-interesting role I helped an English Lit PhD move into, for example, was this Academic Engagement Officer role with the UK’s National Archives.

Applying research skills to different settings

We’re now moving a bit further out from your subject area and thinking about applying your more general research skills (lit review, qualitative/ quantitative methods, source analysis, experience with certain participant groups, etc.) to wider fields. As a literature PhD I found phrases like ‘research methods’ difficult to associate with because I didn’t feel like I had them, and I certainly hadn’t ‘trained in’ them. I just… read books. HOWEVER, there IS a methodology to just ‘reading books’… you need to decide on a scope, identify relevant literature, analyse that literature for themes and patterns, then use this analysis to draw a conclusion. And that’s a research process that is highly transferable to other settings. So, this manifestation of industry could include research-focused roles in:

• Charities or non-profits: for example, the history PhD whose project looked at the impact of certain legislation on young people, who moved into a research role with a children’s charity. As well as being called ‘research <something>’, these roles might also be called things like ‘Insights <something>,’ ‘Impact and Evaluation <something>’, and maybe a whole range of other stuff that a good nosy on LinkedIn might help to illuminate.
• Private research agencies and consultancies, like the Modern Greek PhD who went to work as a researcher for a consulting firm, doing interview-based research projects for clients including the UN and OXFAM.
• Government/ Civil Service research, such as the Theology PhD graduate who became a policy researcher for the Cabinet Office.

Applying ‘academia skills’ in ‘industry’

Here I’m not thinking so much about your research area, or your research-specific skills, but more about all that ‘other stuff’ you do in humanities academia. Writing. Teaching. Presenting. Managing admin. Analysing data… if that’s what you call it in your project or field. In short, therefore, this grouping focuses on applying your broader skills gained from humanities academia to different settings and subject matter. Examples include:

• Grant writing or bid writing: a skill gained in academia that is in demand not just in organisations like charities who need to bid for funding, but private sector companies who need to put together bids to win new contracts and business.
• Other writing professions like content writing or technical writing: This is how Cat, a former theology academic, made her academic exit… through a role as a content writer for a software company.
• Teaching. Compulsory education, tertiary education, adult education… and so on.
• Stuff involving supporting research or researchers: your humanities PhD has given you a glimpse into how academia – and academics – work, and how to communicate with people in the academic system. For a lot of ‘research adjacent‘ roles in universities like research support or research facilitation, research development or impact roles, researcher development or training (kind of like my job where you are supporting researchers either with their doctoral journey, or their next steps), or other academic adjacent roles that might either be student-facing, staff-facing, or external-facing.

… Other Stuff

However I try to classify career options post-PhD, I always end up with a random rag bag of ‘other stuff’ that doesn’t fit into any other neat category. Some things I haven’t mentioned yet that I might stick in here are:

• I haven’t really mentioned things I’d think of as being more allied to the ‘arts’ rather than the ‘humanities’: things I’ve heard referred to as ‘GLAM’ careers – not for their inherent glamour, but because they spell out the acronym Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums.
• Career pivot into ‘something totally different’ either through something like a structured graduate training scheme (like Ben did, from Roman History into a UK public sector grad scheme), or through exploration and development of other skills outside the PhD, like a Philosophy PhD I worked with who took some free coding courses during her PhD, got hooked, and then got a job in software engineering.
• Moving into something based on your ‘other’ experience, e.g. jobs or volunteering you did alongside, or previous to, your PhD. This could be anything from holding an EDI rep role on a departmental committee and moving into diversity-related work, segueing from a role like a student ambassador into working in student recruitment or events organisation, on so on.
• The stuff I will inevitably miss, because such is the richness and variety of what people go onto after a humanities PhD.

So there we have it, my attempt at demystifying some of what ‘industry’ means if you have a humanities academic background. If you’ve got other examples – maybe even you yourself have segued from a humanities PhD to something that isn’t represented here – then let us know in the comments… sharing is caring, especially when we’re trying to figure out where on earth we fit into whatever ‘industry’ is, may be, or soon will be.