English graduates enter a wide range of jobs in many sectors of employment, utilising the transferable skills developed from their study. These skills often include communication skills, both written and verbal, research skills, the ability to interpret information and pick out essential points from texts, negotiation skills, and excellent organisational and time management skills.

Data obtained from

• Single and joint honours English and English Literature courses (BA)
• Graduates from the UK 

Responses were received from 107 UK graduates from 2019/20; this is a response rate of 65.2%

Destinations

Most important activity	Percentage of graduates
Paid work for an employer	50.5%
Self-employment/freelancing	0.9%
Running my own business	0%
Developing a creative, artistic or professional portfolio	10.3%
Voluntary/unpaid work for an employer	3.7%
Engaged in a course of study, training or research	26.2%
Taking time out to travel	0%
Caring for someone	0%
Retired	0%
Unemployed and looking for work	5.6%
Doing something else	2.8%

Sector information

English graduates from Bristol enter careers within education, the public sector, the media including broadcasting, journalism, publishing, and health and social work. Careers chosen, however, can be as wide ranging as retail, the travel industry, accountancy or marketing, since many careers do not require a specific degree. In fact 70% of jobs are open to graduates of any discipline. These include areas such as Law, IT, Finance and other commercial careers where the wide range of skills developed while studying English at Bristol can be used.

Sector	Number of graduates
General secondary education	8
Support activities to performing arts	3
Advertising agencies	3
Book publishing	3
Publishing of newspapers	2
Regulation of the activities of providing health care, education, cultural services and other social services	2
Other sectors (24 sectors)	32

Employers and occupations

Examples of employers

• National Trust
• Her Mejesty's Treasury
• BBC
• Google
• Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd

Examples of occupations

• Editorial Assistant
• Account Executive
• Policy Officer
• Data Product Consultant
• English Teacher

Further study

Qualification type	Percentage of graduates
Higher degree, mainly by research (e.g. PhD, DPhil, MPhil, MRes)	8.3%
Higher degree, mainly by taught course (e.g. MA, MSc, MBA)	75%
Postgraduate diploma or certificate (including PGCE/PGDE)	8.3%
Professional qualification	0%
Undergraduate degree (including integrated master’s degrees) (e.g. BA, BSc, MBChB, MEng)	0%
Other undergraduate diploma or certificate not specified above	2.8%
Other qualification	0%
Not aiming for a formal qualification	0%