Below, UoP history alumni Nia Picton-Phillips writes about how her experiences at Portsmouth gave her the skills she needed to succeed in heritage marketing and retail at Chippenham Museum in Wiltshire. Nia studied for a BA and then an MRes in history, researching holocaust memorialisation, with Dr Mathias Seiter as her supervisor.
I’ve always had a passion for history and learning about the past, so when I was applying for university and writing my UCAS personal statement, I imagined that I’d spend my career as a historian, completing a PhD, specialising in a particular field, and becoming an expert. Perhaps that is still true in a way, as I’ll never rule anything out, but as I’ve navigated life after university, my history degrees have taken me far beyond what I thought possible.
Deciding what you want to do with your life after university can often feel pressurised, confusing, and overwhelming. You might think that whatever you do next has to be directly connected to the degree you’ve just spent years studying, otherwise what was it all for? I remember the excitement I felt when I got my first job in a museum after completing my master’s degree research. It was in London, as the Retail and Admissions Supervisor at the National Army Museum, and I felt so accomplished. At the same time, I was disheartened that I was staying in a retail role, a sector I’d been working in since the age of fourteen. However, in the years since, I’ve come to realise that it doesn’t matter if your career moves away from your degree subject. What matters is taking the lessons and skills with you wherever you go. When I think about my path from history to retail and marketing, I’ve realised that my degrees have, in fact, prepared me exceptionally well for what I am doing today.
Chippenham Museum
In my current role as Museum Services Officer, I am responsible for the retail and marketing at Chippenham Museum. One of the most surprising aspects of my job is how much I draw on what you learn about people when studying history. A history degree immerses you in centuries of human behaviour: what motivated people, the actions they took, and how attitudes, beliefs, religion, and much more shaped the past. I carry this into almost everything I do now, because the skills you learn from history, particularly of understanding people and their motivations, are essential in both retail and marketing.
Some of the exhibits at the museum
For retail especially, understanding people and their habits is crucial. My degrees gave me the foundations to explore why consumers buy, how they respond, what they expect, and how they behave. This knowledge helps me make better decisions when choosing product ranges, planning merchandising, and even something as seemingly simple as pricing. Studying history taught me to look beneath the surface, ask questions that expand on what is in front of me, and recognise patterns and context.
From start to finish, I am responsible for the retail lifecycle. Using the museum collection, galleries, and temporary exhibitions, I plan product ranges to support the programme, making sure they link to and extend the stories we tell. Much of what we do at the museum is connected to local people, stories, and community heritage, so it is important that the work I do reflects and maintains these connections. I work with many local artists and makers, some on bespoke products, some to support specific exhibitions, and others simply as a meaningful way of supporting small local businesses. These relationships matter not only for the retail side of the museum, but also for the stories we share. Knowing the people behind the products helps us connect with visitors, which in turn supports our targets and key performance indicators (KPIs) by converting visits into sales that help to support the museum’s work. But at the heart of it all, it’s still about people, the connections we build, and the skills we bring with us.
Some of Nia’s merchandise on display
As a historian, you spend a lot of time analysing all types of source material, searching for inferences, contradictions, and evidence to support your argument or research question. Much of this rings true in a career in retail and marketing. Instead of analysing a William Hogarth engraving for visual imagery and its depiction of public execution, religion, and the hierarchical infrastructure of eighteenth-century society, I now analyse sales data, social media performance, link clicks, audience demographics – the list goes on. The ability to look closely at the details, build a bigger picture, and notice what is not immediately visible is essential for my job. I produce reports, regularly assess the performance of retail and marketing, and use data as evidence for why a particular product is selling well or why a social media post has unusually high engagement. Studying history gave me the analytical skills I rely on every day to understand information, justify decisions, and make improvements.
In both of my dissertations, I followed a particular line of interest: the representation of history, especially the Holocaust. I first explored how it is portrayed in literature for young readers, and then, for my MRes dissertation, examined its commodification at concentration camp memorial sites. While Chippenham Museum has its own historical past, it is not tied to the same level of difficult questions I encountered during this research. However, what I learned has been invaluable. It taught me how to approach marketing and retail with care, how to complement visitors’ experiences rather than distract from them, and how to keep products and social media content relevant, sensitive, approachable, and purposeful. The ethics and research practices I developed during my studies now help me handle Chippenham’s stories and people with care.
Some of Nia’s merchandise on display
Looking back, I can see how my history degrees gave me the foundation for a career I could not have imagined when I first applied to university. The research, storytelling, and analytical skills, amongst many others, that I developed and refined during my time at the University of Portsmouth, continue to inform my work every day. My degrees opened doors for me, and I hope that through this blog that you can see that a degree in history will open doors for you, too.
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