Career Readiness

By Julia Brookins and Brendan Gillis

This essay excerpt is part of the AHA’s Career for History Majors (2nd Edition). The full booklet may be purchased on OUP’s website.

 

Graduates with degrees in history can make a compelling case that they bring valuable skills to a wide variety of workplaces. Hiring managers may or may not know much about what students learn in specific courses. This provides history majors with important opportunities to explain what we are able to do and why it matters. Historical habits of mind are poised to become even more crucial as artificial intelligence and other technologies continue to transform the workforce.

History majors can augment what they learn in the classroom as they prepare to seek employment. Here are a few practical suggestions to make your job application stand out from the crowd:

• Prepare résumés and talking points to highlight durable skills in applications, at career fairs, and in job interviews.
• Use the career resources available at your institution. This may include career advising offices, mentorship programs, employment fairs, alumni networks, and résumé writing workshops.
• Work with your academic advisor to build a balanced program of study with courses in history and other disciplines that complement your career goals.
• Develop a career portfolio with samples of relevant work, including research, writing, websites, and other media.
• Begin building a professional network, conduct informational interviews with people in the career(s) that you’re interested in pursuing, identify what skills they use in their daily work, and cultivate your own expertise in these areas.
• Seek internships and other hands-on work experience related to jobs you are considering.

 

Make Your Education Work for You

While pursuing your undergraduate degree, you will have many opportunities to build your career readiness.

Choose coursework that develops knowledge and skills you expect to use in your preferred career pathways. Do you expect to need people skills (for example, in customer service, museums, or education)? Consider courses that cover a range of historical times, places, and experiences. Will your preferred career involve solving problems? Look for courses that ask different types of questions about the past and/or with a variety of assignments that require reading, writing, analysis, oral presentations, and use of digital tools. Will you need to demonstrate specific skills, such as data literacy, fluency in a foreign language, or ability to work in a team? Work with your advisor to identify courses, internships, or extracurricular activities to demonstrate these skills.

Looking for a career that motivates you? Pursue your interests and practice explaining why you are passionate about history. Go to faculty office hours and history department events. Consider supporting faculty in their historical research. Complete a substantial historical project (such as a senior capstone paper, thesis, or digital or public history project) and develop a portfolio of relevant work.

Presenting Yourself to Employers

Approach the job application process as you would an assignment in a history course. You have an opportunity to use evidence (personal experience) to support a thesis (I am qualified for this position) that will hopefully lead an employer to the conclusion that they should hire you. To show employers that you are a good candidate, you’ll need to emphasize your college experiences on your résumé and talk about them in a job interview. Read the job description carefully. Know your audience, understand the way that they communicate, and provide evidence that you, too, can communicate in that way. Adapt your language for a busy, nonacademic reader: short and clear, with no jargon, but using some of the terms that are common in the industry where you want to work.

Above all, take advantage of the resources available to you. If your college or university has a career office, ask for advice on how to present yourself professionally, including in writing and adapting your résumé. The people at the career office are valuable resources for history majors, even if they are not already familiar with what you learned in your degree program. You might share with them the list above of the skills that employers want and that history students have, and talk through it together, to help them help you.

A résumé is your opportunity to highlight the skills and experiences that support your application. Focus on clarity and precision, using short phrases with active verbs that might grab an employer’s attention. The goal is to show that you understand what the job requires and to convince a reader that they should want to learn more about you.

Here are some résumé ideas and examples to get you started:

Highlight coursework. Consider adding a bullet point for “relevant courses” or “coursework highlights” under the line for your degree. Don’t list every course you’ve taken. Select a few examples where a topic, course content, or relevant skills support your application. Be prepared to explain why, for instance, a course in Chinese history might prepare you for a job in international business.

Emphasize skills. Many employers use skills-based hiring. You may want to include a “Skills” subheading. Use short, active phrases: problem-solving, data analysis, collaboration, detail oriented, leadership, written and verbal communication. Take inspiration from sample résumés you find effective. A few examples:

• Creative problem-solving with experience in independent research
• Clear written and verbal communication
• Innovative mindset with ability to resolve challenges in a deadline-driven environment

One of the superpowers of history majors is telling compelling stories. In a cover letter, a short anecdote can help your application stand out. In a job interview, good stories can help you respond to questions in ways that connect what you’ve learned to do in college with the kinds of contributions you want to make to a company or organization that is hiring. Script some talking points that connect your experience to the skills required to succeed in the position.

What makes for a good story? Here are examples of how you might represent your experience:

Focus on an independent project. Whether completed as a capstone, in a course, or in an internship, an independent project can demonstrate your dedication, initiative, and ability to tackle complex issues. You may want to break down the steps you took: identifying a gap in existing understanding of a problem; generating a research question to create new knowledge; following instructions; conducting thorough research using digital and offline information systems; gathering and analyzing sources independently; and communicating findings, among many others.

Be specific. Say you created a podcast for a class on the Cold War. What tools and software did you use? How did you pick a topic? Did you make any changes in response to feedback from the instructor?

Share your enthusiasm. Employers want job candidates who are motivated. Why did you major in history? What eras, topics, or sources get you excited to learn? Have some examples in mind but keep it brief. An ounce of passion can make all the difference during an interview.

Consider practical applications. Employers want to see that you can solve problems, navigate complexity, and balance the needs of others. How have you applied what you’ve learned? This is where internships and work experience can help you excel.

Emphasize your ability to learn and grow. History majors recognize the importance of revising our inferences and conclusions as new evidence becomes available. Say that you delivered a presentation about the Haitian Revolution. What did you do to prepare for public speaking? What was the biggest challenge you encountered in completing the assignment? How did you overcome this challenge? Did you discover anything unexpected?

In doing history, this might be a case where you persevered in doing thorough archival research instead of just stopping at the first possible answer to a question. An example like this from your own learning journey will show that you are independently motivated to do your best with each new task.