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School of Arts, Histories and Cultures: MUSIC

Careers and Employability

Careers
The University of Manchester MusB degree and the Joint Course with the RNCM are well-established degree programmes that have produced a wealth of high-achieving graduates, many of whom have gone on to outstanding international careers in the music profession and beyond. They include some of the country’s top musicians and scholars.
The department has a strong reputation for producing professional performers as soloists and major ensembles, nationally and internationally, and the list of professional ensembles Manchester graduates work with is impressively long: it includes several symphony orchestras (the Hallé, the BBC Orchestras, Manchester Camerata, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, CBSO and the orchestras of Bournemouth, Ulster, Reykjavik and Tucson); opera companies (Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, Glyndebourne, Carl Rosa Opera), early music groups (Orchestra of the Renaissance, Gabrieli Ensemble, Monteverdi Choir, Rose Consort of Viols, English Baroque Soloists), choirs (BBC and Swingle Singers) string quartets (Brodsky, Sorrel, Bingham, Bridge, Archinto, Rivoli), brass bands, jazz bands and pop groups.

Our alumni in these fields include:

Many go on to further study in universities or conservatoires: several prominent lecturers and professors in musicology and composition are Manchester graduates. Our alumni in this field include:

Careers chosen by our graduates demonstrate the wide range of music-related professions for which our degrees prepare you, including:

Our alumni work for institutions and companies such as the BBC, San Francisco Opera, Spitalfields Festival, the Britten-Pears foundation, the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund, Sage Gateshead, the National Youth Orchestra, Scottish Opera, London Sinfonietta, Oxford University Press, Schott, Faber, Universal Edition, HMV, Gramophone, Time Out, The Guardian, and City Life. They include:

The Manchester degree can equip you with an enormous range of skills and, of course, not all our graduates have opted for a career in music. Their careers include:

Our graduates in these fields work for companies such as IBM, Disney, M&S and the National Trust.

Alumni Profiles
It usually takes time to develop the kinds of innovative, creative and performing careers at which our graduates excel, so to give you a perspective on the kinds of employment our graduates take up in the first few years after graduating, we have developed a range of alumni profiles of students who have graduated from the department recently.

 

Employability

In today’s challenging employment market it is more important than ever that you can be confident your degree will prepare you for your future career. A Music degree equips you with an enormous number of skills, helping you to prepare both for careers within music, and for a much broader range of jobs. Our degree programmes are designed to give you the maximum flexibility to develop your particular strengths and interests, with increasing specialisation in your final year: thus the skills you acquire will be individual to you, depending on your course choices. Nevertheless, when you graduate with a Music degree from Manchester, you can expect to be able to demonstrate most (though probably not all!) of the following music-specific abilities:

The more broad-based skills your Music degree will help you acquire include:

If you need inspiring about the kinds of careers you might pursue with a degree in Music from Manchester, check out our alumni profile pages, which contains details of what some of our recent graduates have done.

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