10 Perfect Jobs for History Majors (That Aren’t Historian or Professor)

If you have an undergraduate degree in history, you might be surprised to discover just how many other professionals do too. Although the number of history majors is declining every year, more than a million people currently in the workforce have a history degree. While some history majors do go on to become historians, high school teachers, or college professors, many others pursue a career outside academia—in fields that vary from law to research and even medicine—and so can you.

“History is a way of thinking—it’s about training your brain to think a certain way,” says Gretchen Heefner, associate professor of history and undergraduate program advisor at Northeastern University. “Very few of our undergraduate students become historians. They go into it to do other things.”

Prospective employers might not list a history degree as a “must-have” on a job description, but the skills you develop as a history student can absolutely benefit an organization and prepare you for a variety of roles.

It’s not just about the ability to memorize facts and figures. History majors develop a number of transferable skills:

• Research: This is the bread and butter of the history major: researching something historically important using primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, then bringing together different pieces of information into a cohesive whole. An employer would love to see this skill in an employee who can take on a challenge, find the right sources of information, and synthesize them in a way that makes sense and solves the problem.
• Critical thinking: History majors need to take different kinds of information—a journal, historical text, science report, census study—and understand what each has to offer in order to make connections and formulate arguments. This involves interpreting information and assessing a source to determine if and how it helps solve the question. This also requires going beyond the obvious and what “seems” like the right answer. Lots of companies thrive on innovation, and this kind of out-of-the-box thinking will add a ton of value.
• Communication: History majors train in communicating both in writing and oral presentations. How do you take what you’ve learned and explain it, within a word or time limit, so your audience easily understands something complex? That core skill is incredibly valuable to an employer—in particular, being able to present something to colleagues or clients is an underrated skill that not everyone has.
• Prediction: All of this work of deciphering and analyzing means you can understand cycles and patterns of behavior. Your research may assess: Why did an event occur? What led to it? How did we get from A to B? What do these historical events tell us about the present or future? Companies need this same type of thinking to answer business questions: Will their app work in a particular market? Will a policy be effective for a group of people? Is it worth it to make an investment in a particular solution? Based on the results of a previous campaign strategy, how should they change their approach in the future?
• Organization and management: You may not realize it, but you’re engaging in project management when you do research. You’re taking an enormous set of tasks, breaking it down into manageable parts, completing them one by one, and keeping track of deadlines while you work. So you can bring together not only disparate sources of information, but also action items, projects, and people. Businesses need people who can multitask and stay organized without losing sight of a goal.

With this in mind, what can you do with a bachelor’s degree in history? Check out these 10 jobs—seven of which don’t require any graduate-level education. Salary information comes from the compensation resource PayScale, reflecting numbers from March 2021 (their database is updated nightly):