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Posted Nov. 24, 2014

Postgrad Careers: Finding An Uncommon Niche

I first thought about uncommon jobs when out shopping one day. If there’s one thing that makes living off Sainsbury’s Basics food better, it’s the incredible self-deprecating captions all the products have on them, which basically say ‘I’m pretty terrible, but I’ll do’. For example, the caption on the plums I have in my fruit bowl say ‘no lookers, great cookers’. One day as I reached for the Basics grated cheese, I had a sudden revelation; it must actually be someone’s pretty much full-time job to write these, and that there may be some genius copywriter out there spending his days writing these hilarious lines, someone who has found their tiny niche in a huge field and is excelling in it.

These tiny niche careers exist everywhere, from doorknob designers to, as famously shown in an episode of ‘Parks and Recreation’, companies who sell dry cleaning chemicals to dry cleaners. So, when choosing a career path to take, bear the anything-but-basic Basics copywriter in mind. Finding an uncommon niche and excelling at it can be a great way to get into careers that seem dauntingly impossible to enter into.

So where to start? Well, you may have already started the process when you were choosing your postgrad degree. You may have chosen your university based on a certain research interest that you have. Contrary to the popular opinion of everyone over the age of 30 that asks ‘what are you going to do with a degree in (insert niche subject said with tone of scepticism here)? Teach?’ – teaching or further academia is not your only choice when looking for work.

Say you’ve taken an agricultural masters degree. This does not mean that agricultural management or teaching about agriculture are your only two job prospects. A perfectly lucrative career can be made in freelance writing, with publications and particularly trade journals needing expert voices in areas that other writers just won’t have. Equally, a conversion to agricultural law could be equally doable, or any number of other agricultural-tinged roles that are just a Google search away.

Essentially, what you should do is think about a career that you may want to do and then consider what your extremely specific interests can bring to that field. Clients or employers in a relevant field appreciate someone extremely well-informed in their specific area, and the fewer experts that there are, the more you can charge for your niche. After all, who else are they going to get with that much essential knowledge in a specific area? Pretty soon, you can have your own media empire, becoming the agricultural Alan Sugar.

Look at me, for example. I have combined the niche that is ‘being a postgrad student’ with a desire to write to make headway in the cut-throat world of journalism as a writer specialising in student life writing. And I look forward to networking with a future of women’s rights YouTube superstars and people whose job it is to writing with one-liners on 17p tins of beans.

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