Career Advice for All Those New Graduates with English Degrees

A couple times recently, I’ve talked to recent graduates with English degrees. These are smart, very capable people who are sometimes saddled with romantic ideas about the world of work for people who love words. These people have been good students since about preschool, they have loved books starting with Charlotte’s Web, and they have just spent four years thinking hard and diligently about ideas and their expression. And they are heading out into the world hoping to be the editors of the next great American novels.

I used to be one of them. And I think of myself as practical, but looking back, I made a few impractical choices. Even if people had steered me away from them (and looking back, there were a couple quiet voices…but it takes more than quiet voices to counter romance) I might have done all the same things. After all, it’s hard to regret the experiences that brought you to your present adventure — the experiences that were, although impractical from one perspective, still fun and experience-building and filled with good people.

Still, I would advise current and recent English majors to try to take a practical approach to their careers. You may have chosen to major in English because your favorite thing in the world is to curl up in a cozy chair with a big, fat book, or to sit at your computer and write short stories, but it is unlikely you will get paid well to do exactly those things. However, there are things that are close enough to those things that you will probably enjoy them, too — maybe just as much, when you actually get down to it.

You should absolutely do something you are passionate about…but you need to be looking to the future as you do it.

So, here is the advice I have for the English majors who graduate and want to work in the very wide world of words:

1. Develop some coding skills, if you don’t have them yet. You will need them at some point, even if it’s just to communicate effectively with other people who will actually be doing the coding.
2. Develop a basic understanding of marketing. Marketing is part of everything and you will need to be a marketer as part of or in addition to whatever else you do.
3. Learn to love the idea of customers. You will have customers, in some form, whatever you do, and they will be the people who will inspire and drive and appreciate all your hard work. Start thinking about things from their perspective as soon as you can.
4. Familiarize yourself with basic design principles and also with web-specific design principles. Anything involving content is going to involve design and at some point you will need to be able to do at least a little bit of it or at least have an opinion about it.
5. Take a professional course in editing and/or digital publishing.
6. Start a blog on something that interests you.
7. Keep reading and writing the things you love to read and write, but consider which part of that needs to be at the core of your day job.
8. If you want to work in traditional book publishing, move to New York City. You need to be where the jobs are. But go quickly while traditional publishing still exists, sort of. Those jobs are already different from what they used to be, and they will change while you are in them, so even if you go that route you will need to prepare yourself for the future — which almost certainly will center more on new forms of writing and publishing online than on books.
9. If you do not live in New York City, figure out what the word-related jobs are where you live (or that can be done remotely) and prepare yourself to do those jobs. There are many many different kinds of jobs that involve reading and writing. The internet is all content, after all.
10. Don’t start a new career looking back at the old world of publishing. It looks like it was a great time for the people who were in it. They wrote many books (it was publishing, after all) about how glamorous and wonderful it was and we can read them and experience it vicariously. But now we get to be part of a grand evolution of writing and reading and content. Now is a very exciting time.