Career Opportunities with a Journalism Degree

If you’ve chosen to study a broad Journalism degree then you may not be sure which direction you want to take your career in after graduation.

However, the modules you take during your course should help you decide which aspects of journalism you enjoy, and more importantly, which you don’t.

Generally speaking you’ll end up focusing on one of the three main areas of journalism:

Print Media
TV and Radio
Digital and Online

You course will have covered all of those three areas, unless you took a course that focused on only one, such as Digital Media.

As all journalism graduates will tell you, journalism isn’t a glamorous job. Unfortunately even celebrity news and events journalists spend hours working behind the scenes to pull a story together so it isn’t all swanky parties with popstars.

That said, if you’re passionate about journalism and work hard to hone your skills then all the effort will be worth it and you’ll build a career that you love.

Here’s more about the career opportunities with a Journalism degree.

What skills will I gain during my degree?

Of course you’ll gain many journalism specific skills such as how to craft a good story and interview techniques but you’ll also learn many transferrable skills that will be appealing to employers in any industry.

These skills include:

Critical analysis
The ability to work productively both alone and as part of a team
A flexible, creative and independent approach to tasks
The ability to meet deadlines
The ability to communicate information effectively and clearly
Strong research skills
The ability to listen

All of the skills are crucial in any number of occupations so if you’re not sure where you want to go with your career, you can be confident in the knowledge that you’re not limiting your options by taking a more specialised degree course.

Jobs directly related to your degree

The obvious job for Journalism graduates is to become a journalist but the list of possibilities associated with that job title is almost endless.

Roles that come under the broad term of “journalism” include:

As you can see there are plenty of opportunities within journalism to build a successful and varied career.

As we’ve said above, generally speaking you’ll work in one of the three areas of journalism – Print Media, Online Media, and TV and Radio.

Print Media

They’ve been saying for years that print media is dying but we’re not convinced so don’t let that put you off if this is your chosen area of journalism.

To pursue a journalism career in print media, you must develop your writing skills right from day one. Be a wordsmith, the one that everyone would love to have in their newsroom. Your job won’t involve broadcasting live, but you’ll still need to meet deadlines (which will sometimes be short) if you won’t want your story to end up in the bin.

At the same time, the responsibilities of print media journalists are fast-evolving; they are now required to have some additional skillsets, including an understanding of online media.

Online Media

The world of Online Media isn’t that different from Print Media – you’ll still need to be excellent with words and have all the basic skills a journalist should have.

However, you may also need some additional skills such as video and photography skills. You’ll also need to understand the importance of SEO and have at least a rough understanding of how websites work.

When you work with online media, you must focus more on the art of storytelling and audience engagement. You must know how to present a story in a way that that could drive more traffic to your website.

TV and Radio

Electronic media has plenty of opportunities to offer and you can choose to specialise in either radio or television journalism.

Jobs in television and radio are extremely competitive so to put yourself head of the hundreds of other journalism graduates you should try to get an understanding of how the industry works, including the technological side, before graduation.

Obviously you should have excellent writing skills, but you will have incredibly higher chances of success if you also have some technical expertise, including knowledge of how to handle a camera and edit audio and video recordings.

Jobs not directly related to your degree

If none of the above appeals to you then there are many others roles where your Journalism degree would be useful, not necessarily essential to the job: