English degree

[AutumnalRose]

Hello. I'm looking at doing an English Literature degree, it's something I've always wanted to do. For anyone with a degree in that subject, what career have you go on to use it with? Thanks

Depending on what type of institution you do your degree at, you may need to make up your mind to doing some further study at postgraduate level in order to render yourself employable.

I'm an academic in Eng Lit who also writes fiction and teaches creative writing (my department is a School of English and Creative Writing), so I did 2 MAs, a DPhil and postdoctoral study en route to my career. Very few of our doctoral students now take that route, as there are few jobs and little security in such a career path. Friends from my undergraduate English degree are in teaching, publishing, librarianship, journalism, arts admin and lots of completely unrelated fields like civil service, politics, diplomacy etc.

You can do loads with an Eng degree. It's more about the classification you get for the usual suspect job routes.

I'm a City lawyer.

I'm in management in the Education sector (not English faculty).

Not me, but my friend is an author and a literature academic. She did a PhD after her first degree.

DH was an officer in the RAF and now is a consultant in Project Manager type roles.

I am a director level fundraiser and been in the charity sector for over twenty years

I make documentaries

I work in marketing (content management/copywriting)

I'm an Operational Manager in the voluntary sector

I'm a teacher ( I wanted to be!). Friends who I still know about are corporate lawyer, two academics, one uni administrator, two more teachers, a Times columnist, and a film director.

Journalist.
Others I know have gone into nursing, charity work, research, speech and language, management consultancy, academia, publishing

Thank you for all of your replies. It wounds like you/partners/friends have such interesting jobs.

Radio and TV producer BBC. An English degree will give you so many transferable skills . Usually though you have to do some kind of further training for specific careers.

I work in market research. I joined a grad scheme which just asked for a 2.1 in any subject. Several people from my uni course did law conversion after their degree, a couple went into academia, teaching, comms roles.
However this was 20+ years ago as I suspect were others on this thread, the employment market and careers options will look different now.
The other thing to say is that the people who went into the most ‘interesting’ careers tended to have the means to get into them e.g financial support from parents to work for free, connections in industries etc. They weren’t applying through open recruitment in a lot of cases.
English is definitely an interesting degree with skills you can apply in a range of fields.