If you’re in job-hunting purgatory, this is the place. Today is the day we silence the voices of critical parents and know-it-all STEM students who claim that degrees in the humanities are nothing more than wall décor. It’s time to end the gatekeeping and spill the beans on the most lucrative careers in the arts.
Of course, it goes without saying that there is a chance of finding a job directly linked with your area of interest. This varies depending on your specific degree. Since finding a dream job in the arts can be a rare experience, largely dependent on luck and connections, it’s difficult to use this as a fool-proof plan for the future. If you do aim to achieve the impossible and find a career truly entrenched in the arts, it would be advisable to get as much work experience in that area as humanly possible. Struggling through a few weeks as an unpaid and overworked intern every summer can make a world of difference when you apply to work in fields where fewer jobs exist. It is important to remember that even if you land your dream job, you might not be landing a sizable pay-check, and it would be advisable to compare your expectations for a standard of living with the average salary of the role you want.
If you aren’t too enthusiastic about following your dreams all the way to a career as a starving artist, there are plenty of other job opportunities for arts graduates. Some don’t even involve getting a Master’s in Law and sacrificing your soul to the corporate world. An example of this would be getting a Professional Master’s in Education and sacrificing your soul to moody teenagers. Alternatively, you could get a Masters in your chosen field of interest and sacrifice your soul to academia. However, it is necessary to remember your reality when considering further education. Not everyone has the money to throw at another college degree, and/or a soul left to sacrifice. If becoming ferociously over-educated is beginning to sound appealing to you, it may be time to consider actually showing up to your tutorials and using Reading Weeks to do your assignments, as opposed to lying in bed and watching the latest art-house cinema piece to grace your extremely pretentious social media feeds. Scholarships do wonders for prospective Master’s students, and a good academic transcript can help you get the financial assistance you might need. As for recovering lost souls for sacrificial purposes, it’s a proven fact that sitting in a train on a rainy day and staring mournfully into the distance does wonders for that particular ailment.
“Work-life balance in these careers tends to be quite good, so you could find time to sell your abstract paintings on Etsy and maintain your creative spirit”
If you don’t have the money, the desire, or the academic willpower to spend another year in the education system, there is no need to panic. The myth that an undergraduate arts degree can’t take you anywhere is just that – a myth. A wide range of jobs exist for prospective graduates, but be warned – some of these careers could be considered rather mundane. For example, applying to enter the civil service with your Classics degree might not allow you to put your obsessive knowledge of Greek mythology to use. However, if you want a stable career with opportunities for growth and secure benefits, it might be worth conducting a quick Google search and finding out what civil servants actually do. The main requirement for potential applicants is a very non-specific Level Eight Bachelor’s degree, so if romanticising life as the government’s most chaotic employee sounds somewhat tolerable, be sure to check it out! It’s also worth noting that a lot of private companies and businesses are also willing to hire arts graduates as administrative employees with similar duties to civil servants. Work-life balance in these careers tends to be quite good, so you could find time to sell your abstract paintings on Etsy and maintain your creative spirit after you clock out.
“If all else fails, you could always sign up to be a research subject in a neuropsychiatric experiment measuring the exact size of the average arts student’s ego”
All in all, the careers you can find with an arts degree are infinite, and if this article listed them all, it would be bigger than your inferiority complex. To throw you some final lifelines, jobs in retail, HR, and social media are perfectly compatible with degrees in the humanities. If all else fails, you could always sign up to be a research subject in a neuropsychiatric experiment measuring the exact size of the average arts student’s ego. Hopefully your eyes have been opened to the endless possibilities of the job market for Humanities graduates. Try to remember this article every time someone asks you about the future. This writer wishes you all the best, no matter which path you choose to pursue.
