King’s Careers & Employability gathers statistics on graduate employment destinations for the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). Such data is available for the Department of Digital Humanities’ cohorts for the three academic years between 2010/11 and 2012/13, that is to say graduates of the MA Digital Humanities, the MA Digital Asset and Media Management and the MA Digital Culture and Society of those years. This information, which includes the sectors and organizations that alumni enter, and their job titles, is gathered from telephone interviews and online surveys six months after their graduation. Of those who graduated in 2012/13, 93.8% were in full time work, with the remainder undertaking further study in some form. 38.4% of those approached did not reply, or refused to provide answers. A certain health warning must therefore be attached to the information currently available; and in the last couple of years the numbers on all three programmes have grown considerably, so the sample size is small compared to the numbers of students currently taking the degrees. But in surveying the data that we do have, it is possible to make some preliminary observations.
Firstly, the good news is that all of our graduates from 2012/13 who responded to the survey were in employment, or undertaking further studies, within those six months. In the whole three-year period, MA DAMM graduates entered the digital asset management profession via corporations including EMAP, and the university library sector (Goldsmiths College). They also entered managerial roles at large corporations including Coca-Cola and the Wellcome Trust. Digital media organizations feature strongly in MA DCS students’ destinations, with employers including NBC, Saatchi and Saatchi and Lexisnexis UK, with roles including design, social media strategy and technical journalism. Librarianship is also represented, with one student becoming an Assistant Librarian at a very high-profile university library. Others appear to have gone straight in to quite senior roles. These include a Director of Marketing, PR and Investments at an international educational organization, a Senior Strategy Analyst at a major international media group, and a Senior Project Manager at a London e-consultancy firm. One nascent trend that can be detected is that graduates of MA DH seem more likely to stay in the research sector. Several HE institutions feature in MA DH destinations, including Queen Mary, the University of Oslo, Valencia University, the Open University and the University of London, as well as King’s itself; although graduates entering these organizations are doing so in technical and practical, roles such as analysts and e-learning professionals, rather than as higher degree research students. A US Office of the State Archaeologist, Waterstones and Oxford University Press also feature, reflecting (perhaps) MA DH’s strengths in publishing and research communication. Many of the roles which MA DH graduates enter are specialized, for example Data Engineer, Conservator Search Engine Evaluator, although more junior managerial jobs also figure.
As noted, the figures on which these observations are based must be treated with some caution; and doubtless as data for 2013/4 and beyond become available, clearer trends will emerge from across the three MA programmes. Currently, there is a range of destinations to which our graduates go, spanning the private and research sectors, and there is much overlap in the types of organizations for which graduates from all three programmes work and the roles they obtain. However, two broad conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, that all three programmes offer a range of skills based on a critical understanding of digital theory and practice which can be transferred to multiple kinds of organization/role. Secondly our record on full employment shows that there is growing demand for these skills, and that those skills are becoming increasingly essential to both the commercial and research sectors.
Stuart Dunn 