Careers

Our careers support includes guidance on work placement, on skills development, and on preparing for job applications and interviews in a wide range of careers. All three of our MA programmes include an option to undertake a research placement with one of our external partners (ranging from the British Library to Google) for credit, and the elective module ‘Linguistics in the Real World’ in which students have the opportunity to meet and network with guests who use linguistics expertise in their work in a wide range of fields.

As Linguistics is closely tied to subjects such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and cultural studies, it equips students with an unusually wide range of skills, including:

• Using logic and evidence to build arguments
• Fieldwork skills and gathering data from a range of people
• Ability to see patterns in complicated situations
• Confidence in learning new systems, including software and basic statistics
• Sensitivity to diverse cultures, communities, and human behaviour
• Understanding of texts, genres, and spoken communication

We train students to recognise and promote this wide-ranging toolkit of skills when they apply for jobs, whatever their chosen career path may be.

Some of our students go on to careers that deal directly with language , e.g. English language teaching, IT and speech technology, speech and language therapy, translation and interpreting, language-related market research, publishing, forensics, dialect coaching, and language-related research and policy development. Many of our students apply their skills in a wider range of careers, such as journalism, advertising, marketing, banking, human resources, counseling, and social work. Graduates work for governments, corporations, nonprofits, and in their own entrepreneurial businesses and practices. Further information can be found on our alumni page. Many of our students have also gone on to pursue PhDs in Linguistics, either with us at QMUL, or at other leading universities around the world.