Employability

Our postgraduates come from all walks of life, and they head into an equally wide range of rewarding careers. 

Graduates from our taught masters are enjoying huge success at entering the job market and have progressed on to a range of employment and career development opportunities. The diversity of these roles includes working in the law, teaching, environmental consultancy, civil service, humanitarian focused disaster risk reduction and community resilience support officers. Our former students are playing a key role in managing hazard and risk around the world, working for example with UNICEF.

Some of our postgraduate students pursue advanced degrees whilst taking a break from existing careers, in business or government, to which they return on completion of their studies. Others pursue PhD studies to further establish themselves in their fields of expertise or shift gears into new interdisciplinary fields to pursue research in:

• Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience
• Durham’s Energy Institute
• The Institute for Medical Humanities

 Many of our PhD graduates choose to pursue academic careers within geography with others moving into adjacent fields including choosing to apply their research skills in business, civil society and government.

Our programs are designed to prepare you for diverse opportunities through career development and communication workshops. The time you spend with us is designed to equip you for what comes next, and our postgraduates benefit from an extensive networks of national and international expertise.

Future Careers

Our Postgraduate Alumni have found careers as varied as those listed here:

• International risk management (e.g. UNICEF humanitarian support and UNICEF emergency hazard management, Afghan Ministry of Public Health, Rocinantes NGOs
• Public Health (e.g. Advisor, Afghanistan)
• Fast Track Civil Service
• Asset Management (e.g. with Thames Water and PwC)
• Research (e.g. Research Assistant at the Cambridge University, Centre for Risk Studies)
• Teaching (e.g. University of Hong Kong, Schools in UK)
• Trainee Solicitors
• Emergency Management Analysts (e.g. in USA, and Nepal)
• Regional Flood Officer with The National Flood Forum
• Senior Geologist with National Space Research and Development Agency (Nigeria)
• Catastrophe modellers (Amlin, RMS)
• Resilience planning officer (e.g. with Edinburgh and Newcastle City Councils)
• Brokers and researchers in re-insurance (Catlin, Liberty Syndicates, Marsh, Aviva, Channel Syndicates, Waterman Group, AXIS)
• Environmental consultants working in risk (e.g. JBA, Halcrow, Tiscali, Ambiental, URS, Aurecon, AECOM)
• Environmental Officer with International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Nepal
• PhD Research

Be social. Be informed. Be a part of Durham Geography.