Anthropology and Sociology job prospects?

Not the same, but I got an arts degree and then a masters in development studies so that I could develop a career in international development.

10 years later, I'm leaving the sector. While I have a certain kind of professional experience, neither degrees gave me 'technical experience', which I now find is not enough and I have decided to leave the sector entirely in order to focus on something in the private sector with, hopefully, more prospects.

My point is this: my experience is people will hire you on the basis of what you can do to them (make money or spend money) using a specific set of concrete skills. Knowledge of the world, an academic track record, interest in certain areas, passion and commitment all count for something, but essentially it comes down to having practical skills that you can sell.

I went into development because I thought I could apply my academic interests in a practical way. But after a long, economically difficult road, I learned that nobody really cares about that, even in an area like research and policy that I was trying to break into, unless you can 'do the business'.

In anthropology/sociology, that means getting practical training (hard or soft skills) to do things like do economic analysis or design and implement quantitative sociological research and analyse them and write well about them. For others, they learned a 'profession' (engineering, accountancy, medicine, PR/communications, IT, etc.) and then applied it to development.

Along the way, one might hone one's interpersonal skills, political nous, etc., but you don't get the chance if you can't DO something.

You can get experience after a degree getting lucky and getting good practical experience in a job. Or you can do some kind of post-grad course (not necessarily a masters) that trains you in something practical.

I'm the biggest idealist of them all, not remotely interested in reality, but after ten years of a failed career, I have to get real, and I wish somebody had given this advice, and that I had listened, long, long ago.

Suitable methods training is a necessary transferable skill for anyone looking to the private sector. Different degree programmes will offer differing levels of quantitative training, but unfortunately not to the same extent as the US or UK. Writing research tenders, designing surveys, evaluating programmes and interventions, working with secondary data - these abilities are all relevant to NGO, charity, community organisations, HR consultancies, public sector etc, and the more you can demonstrate, the better your prospects.