As a Ph.D. candidate nearing the end of graduate program funding, I find myself between a rock–the dismal landscape of traditional career paths amidst an unstable economy unsettled by artificial intelligence–and a hard place that is finishing my dissertation while applying for jobs. Many history graduate students find themselves in the same place. To remedy this, I pursued opportunities in government service that advanced my research while creating a career pathway.
My historical training applied to government service in two roles: Legislative Analyst and Grant Writer for the Allegheny County Department of Human Services (DHS). History graduate training equipped me with the abilities and skills required in these positions, but I only learned through firsthand experience how to use industry language to make those connections to hiring and project managers and team members. These circumstances illuminated earlier opportunities in my graduate programming to better clarify and relate the historian’s abilities and research skills to non-academic career paths like public policy.
Historians are underrepresented among professionals from other humanities and social sciences who work in public policy. This is troubling because AI and machine learning threaten to devalue traditional historical critical thinking skills and the ability to assess bias, challenges to which historians are uniquely poised to respond in specific ways across academic and other professional settings. Further, according to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, government and public policy careers offer more opportunities for historians than university settings—a disparity projected to widen in the next decade. History graduate programs can prepare current and future graduate students to thrive in these emerging roles by working to specify historians’ traditional academic abilities, experiences, and skills in the language of non-academic industries.
While the American Historical Association (AHA) has taken strides to expand history graduate students’ career opportunities outside the academy, departments across the country have been slow to change. To meet the needs of the 2020s, graduate training must better articulate the historical discipline’s skills and strengths with special attention to public policy. The shift requires:
(1) new language that relates historical training to the needs of government service careers,
(2) new training for non-academic professional applications within history graduate programs.
History departments already train students in the requisite skills for public policy jobs—writing, research, and electronic research. Grad students learn to navigate a library and use finding aids to conduct archival research using a range of technologies from paper files to microfilm to digital maps and more. They frame questions, use a reproducible trail of evidence to answer the questions, and demonstrate flexibility in the revision process. They translate vast archival research data sets into comprehensive arguments and narratives for academic and public audiences. History departments are well-situated to articulate pathways for applying these skills to technological and professional challenges beyond academia.
Research skills and writing processes familiar to graduate training, for instance, translate into my work for DHS. Like the research process for my dissertation, writing legislative briefs and grants requires the ability to:
- weigh evidence and perspectives, (to consider the needs and input of diverse stakeholders alongside agency mission and other assets and limitations),
- anticipate potential contingencies, (to recognize existing or potential factors requiring adaptative response),
- produce effective writing quickly, (to respond to the input of several editors, produce concise and cogent narrative, and use qualitative and quantitative data).
These abilities further translate into popular skillsets of project management, professional oral and written communication, and strategic planning.
Project Management
Historians learn to manage big ideas and projects with many moving parts, like research and teaching, by using a range of data management programs, organizational habits, and project planning methods. File management programs and simple, consistent data naming and storing conventions developed during graduate study enable historians to quickly respond to evolving imperatives in the public policy environment. Collaborative work common in public policy requires accessible, intuitive data management and organization standards.
As much, the myriad approaches historians take to develop research questions and conduct research trips illustrate their ability to identify problems and ranging solutions fundamental to advancing project goals. Their creative alignment of instructional and assessment strategies with lesson or course goals provides a framework for organizing and prioritizing component parts and tasks of legislative briefs, grants, and other reports. Balancing research and teaching demonstrates the historian’s ability to, like project managers, shift between simultaneous projects of varying scale.
Communication
Beyond managing projects to completion, historians are trained to communicate project complexity to diverse audiences and to build relationships for a range of purposes. Historians use professional communication to build relationships and guide teamwork, facilitate learning with stakeholders, and advance project goals. In the classroom, they regularly use different modes and styles of communication to guide student learning. Historians develop relationships with archivists, librarians, and other external resources to advance research or fund projects. Oral history methods, interdisciplinary projects, and multi-authored publications translate well into team-based work in government service. These skills are necessary in public policy positions.
For example, a recent grant project involved two to three weekly meetings with a senior grant writer and Project Manager. Critical information necessary for framing the grant proposal’s recommendations emerged from personal interviews with several leaders of community partner organizations and DHS administrators. I built relationships with them to acquire insights about how community-informed proposals could advance the agency’s goals. I communicated orally and in writing with community stakeholders and agency representatives about a grant proposal that harmonized community input, agency capacity, and DHS mission and vision.
Strategic Planning
The everyday activities of historians also resemble those of strategic planners in government agencies. Both locate funding sources, create custom applications, and follow up with research leads. Historians demonstrate academic strategic planning when articulating the reasoning behind applying for awards and fellowships. Strategic planners make decisions necessary to advance organizational objectives, which historians demonstrate in designing and facilitating courses. Conference participation, community projects, and publications require strategic planning.
Strategic planners must constantly identify problem-specific human resources. Historians do this in research when looking for leading authors in a new topic’s historiography, when searching for archives and repositories for sources, and when preparing to navigate archives by consulting librarians and archivists. Historians’ ability to recognize complex and often disagreeing views, and to consider the evidence and weight of each in their research and teaching, resembles how strategic planners must factor the input of different stakeholders against structural assets and limitations.
Historians must better connect the component skills of historical research and mainstream project management jobs by more clearly articulating the diverse processes related to and steps between forming a research question, conducting research, and producing analysis. It is more essential than ever that historians identify and amplify the field’s unique capacity to lead collaboration, communicate effectively, and plan strategically. Graduate programs may consider mentorship programs and external partnerships to better prepare current history graduate students for non-academic careers. Historians on the job market possess valuable and transferable skills but must be prepared to advocate for themselves so prospective employers can learn to see that as well.
Featured Image: Christina Morillo, Prexels.com
Clio and the Contemporary 
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