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Digital Humanities (DH) has long been subject to ongoing debate regarding its scope, identity, and professional boundaries (Terras et al. 2013). We address these questions empirically by examining DH through the lens of the labour market, using graduate career outcomes as evidence for how the field is practically defined and understood. It builds on the keynote by Melissa Terras at the Digital Humanities Congress 2024, which highlighted the need for systematic evidence on DH graduate career trajectories, and surveys universities in the UK and Ireland.

We present findings from a 2025 survey of 131 DH graduates who completed their courses between 2002 and 2025 across 17 UK-Ireland universities. [1] Our results show, firstly, that DH employment outcomes (DHeo) are not confined to Academia/Research (32%), with respondents also working in Technology/Software (26%), GLAM/Heritage (18%), Public sector/NGO (10%), and Publishing/Media (8%), among others (Figure 1). Because “industry” was multi-selected, these percentages reflect overall presence rather than exclusive distribution. However, the pattern is clear that DHeo spans research, IT industry, cultural heritage, media and the public sector, which challenges the previous discussion that 75% of DH jobs are obtained within academia (Wang et al. 2021).

Figure 1: Results of Question 10 What industry do you work in? showing DHeo careers distribution in different sectors

Secondly, job roles cluster into both discovery and delivery functions. While academic roles such as Research/RA/Postdoc (17.6%) and Teaching/Lecturer (8.1%) remain significant, technical and operational roles including Project/Product Manager, Data Analyst/Scientist, Developer/Engineer, and UX/Designer collectively account for 33.8%. GLAM and public sector roles further demonstrate the hybrid nature of DHeo (28%), which blends collections informatics, usability, accessibility, and research collaboration. This hybridity reflects what the “creative tensions” between data, humanities, teaching, research, and service, that are “deliberately needful” rather than problematic, which help to explain why DH graduates are particularly legible and attractive to employers across sectors (Booth 2024). These findings also align with existing understandings of DH interdisciplinarity (Winters and Sichani 2023).

Thirdly, employability for DH graduates is strong, with 57% securing work within three months of graduating, 16% within three to six months, and only 4% taking more than a year (Figure 2). While this does not resolve questions of long-term career progression, it challenges persistent stereotypes that humanities-based graduates struggle with employability (Edmondson et al. 2020). Moreover, these findings connect to broader arguments about the value of humanities education, that humanities and arts-based degrees cultivate transferable skills and capacities valued across sectors, including critical thinking, ethical awareness, communication, and adaptability, rather than exclusively academic specialisation (Belfiore 2013).

Figure 2: Results of Question 12 How long did it take you to find your first job after graduating?

Surveyed skill preferences further show the character of DH as a field that integrates practical, technical, and critical capacities. Graduates highlight Data analysis and Data visualisation (75 responses), Text analysis/NLP (70), Programming (65), Databases/SQL (57), Project management (47), alongside critical competencies such as Critical thinking/theory (126) and Data ethics (42). This confirms that DH education cultivates both operational expertise and critical engagement, which supports previous scholarship that frames DH as a site of critical technical practice rather than a simple opposition between tools and theory (Nowviskie 2016).

In relation to ongoing debates within global DH communities and the continuing expansion of DH programmes, these findings have direct implications for pedagogy and workforce development. Programmes should retain core practical skills while strengthening training in critical review, governance, and ethical depth. Our survey suggests that DH should be understood not merely as a collection of technical competencies, but as a field that links infrastructure-building with interpretation, reflexivity, and responsibility. Rather than being marginal or ambiguously defined, DH emerges here as a clearly employable, structurally hybrid, and intellectually grounded domain that continues to evolve, demonstrated by its graduates’ professional trajectories.

1. including University College London, King’s College London, University of Cambridge, University of York, Durham University, University of London School of Advanced Study, University of Galway, Lancaster University, University College Cork, University of Sheffield, University of Glasgow, University of Exeter, University of Leeds, Trinity College Dublin, Maynooth University, University of Edinburgh, the Open University

References

Belfiore, Eleonora. 2013. ‘The “Rhetoric of Gloom” v. the Discourse of Impact in the Humanities: Stuck in a Deadlock?’ In Humanities in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Eleonora Belfiore and Anna Upchurch. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361356_2.

Booth, Alison. 2024. ‘Useless (Digital) Humanities’. Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities, January 1. https://www.academia.edu/97817543/Useless_Digital_Humanities.

Edmondson, John, Piero Formica, and Jay Mitra. 2020. ‘Special Issue: Empathy, Sensibility and Graduate Employment – Can the Humanities Help?’ Industry and Higher Education 34 (4): 223–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/0950422220928821.

Nowviskie, Bethany. 2016. ‘On the Origin of “Hack” and “Yack”’. In Debates in the Digital Humanities: 2016. University of Minnesota Press.

Terras, Melissa M., Julianne Nyhan, and Edward Vanhoutte, eds. 2013. Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Ashgate Publishing Limited ; Ashgate Publishing Company.

Wang, Yahan, Zhiya Zuo, and Xi Wang. 2021. ‘Digital Humanities in the Job Market’. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology 58 (1): 857–59. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.588.

Winters, Jane, and Anna-Maria Sichani. 2023. ‘The Role of Digital Humanities in an Interdisciplinary Research Project’. Science Museum Group Journal 18 (18). https://doi.org/10.15180/221812.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the alumni respondents from the 17 UK and Ireland programmes who completed the Digital Humanities Career Survey. Their time and reflections made this study possible. We’d also like to thank the wider research team for their substantive contributions to survey design, distribution, and discussion: Leif Isaksen, Elizabeth Williamson, Gemma Poulton, Michael Pidd, Catriona Cooper, Paul Gooding, Donald Sturgeon, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Ian Gregory, Lorna-Jane Richardson, Caroline Bassett, Anne Alexander, Hugo Leal.