What kinds of jobs can you get with a linguistics major? What career options are there for linguistics PhDs who don’t want to go into academia?

The linguistics jobs series interviews people who have a linguistics major, linguistics minor, masters in linguistics, or doctorate in linguistics, about what they’re doing with their careers, advice for current linguistics students looking at the job market, what kinds of work experience they had, and what they wish they’d known about trying to get a job with a linguistics degree.

General skills: how to explain why your linguistics degree is relevant in a job interview or application

• Linguistics + X
• LingComm - a series on communicating linguistics to non-linguists
• Advice for writing pop linguistics articles
• Differences between writing pop linguistics, teaching, and even other pop science
• Livetweets and slides from a talk I gave about getting linguistics out of the ivory tower
• Advice for linguistics profs looking to support your students in getting jobs beyond academia
• Lingthusiasm Bonus #3: how to sell linguistics skills to employers

Academic advice:

• Should you go to grad school in linguistics? Maybe
• Linguistics grad school advice, part 1: how do you know if you want to get a PhD in linguistics?
• Linguistics grad school advice, part 2: how do you decide which grad schools to go to or apply to for linguistics?
• How to become a professor in linguistics
• Lingthusiasm Bonus #15: linguistics grad school advice

Long list of possible linguistics jobs:

Both common and unexpected jobs that people have gotten with a linguistics degree - click for interviews! Also check the linguistics jobs tag for the most recent interviews, since it updates automatically.

• Lexicographer
• Scholarly communications librarian
• Health writer
• Policy analyst
• Science fiction writer
• Book publicist
• ESL Teacher
• Literary Agent
• Speech Pathologist (profile, more resources)
• Translator
• Career Linguist
• Research Assistant (more on RAships)

These interviews are by Lauren Gawne at Superlinguo:

• Project manager at a language learning tech company
• Data analyst
• Journalist
• Interpreter
• High school teacher
• Humanitarian aid worker
• Editor & copywriter
• Language revitalization program director
• Copywriter & fiction author
• Tour company director
• Computational linguist
• Speech pathologist
• EFL teacher
• Educational development consultant
• Apprentice mechanic
• Radio digital managing editor
• University course coordinator
• Think tank researcher
• Museum curator
• Communications consultant

I also post or reblog linguistics jobs related articles and resources when I come across them:

• Linguistics and careers in Artificial Intelligence
• How a linguist became a zookeeper
• Video from professional paths for linguists workshop
• Linguists who have become webcomic creators
• Linguists in industry panel video
• Computational linguistics, machine translation (more machine language)
• Linguists in industry panel (primarily tech-focused)
• Letter to a prospective lexicographer
• On naming new products (more on naming)
• Forensic linguistics, more forensic linguistics, and still more
• Professional conlanger
• NASA, user experience testing, and others
• Compilations of resources (and another compilation)
• The four data science skills I didn’t learn in linguistics grad school (and how to learn them)

General careers resources:

• A twitter thread by Tressie McMillan Cottom on getting entry-level jobs from a social sciences degree (and especially how to do informational interviews)
• From PhD to Life (blog on non-academic careers after a PhD)
• The Professor Is In (blog on academic jobs)
• Ask A Manager on resumes and cover letters
• Get Bullish (posts on side hustles and starting a business)