It is college admission time and except for those who have pre-decided on studying Medicine or Law or Engineering, most others find themselves in a quandary. There are a large number of students who, by reflex, take up English Honours. Of these, some have an interest in the subject but there is a large section that opts for it without a thought for career options, only a hope that the penny will drop somewhere along the way.

Even 10 years ago, a degree in English Honours guaranteed little except for a career in academics for those who persevered. Other options were journalism, publishing and advertising. Today, however, with the digital revolution and the shrunken globe, a degree in English can yield a host of very specific job options. Here's a curated list for you.

Content writing

A content writer, depending on the company and the job profile, has to create compelling blog posts, product descriptions for e-commerce sites, content for social media and the intranet. It requires one to have a good grasp of the English language so that the written communication is clear and easy to understand.

Potential employers include not just IT companies but education portals, consultancies, banks, fashion houses and even hospitals. Almost every MNC needs in-house content writers for branding and internal communications. A communications team typically comprises content analysts, writers, editors, SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) and QAs (Quality Analysts) - all job profiles that require writing proficiency.

"Content writing is a vast field. You can do copywriting, academic writing, instructional designing - creating educational content or training materials," says 26-year-old Avipsa Nandy who is currently a senior copywriter with Tata Consult-ancy Services, Bengaluru. Avipsa chose this career almost immediately after graduation. She tells us how the trend has shifted from writing chunks of informative content to writing easy-to-skim and marketing-oriented content. "There's more to content writing than just drip-feed marketing blogs and articles. Good content helps sell products and services. We produce content to educate, inform, persuade and inspire," she says.

Subtitlers

Shayantan Roy is a freelance video subtitler. He works on Bengali films. A subtitler translates dialogues and sound effects into easy-to-read captions. One needs to have descriptive skills and use correct spellings, grammar and punctuation. He explains that this job requires one to be fluent in the language that the original content is made in, as well as the language in which one needs to write the subtitles - which is mostly English.

Shayantan says, "With the surge in online content - video blogs, web series, and platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video - the future of a subtitler is bright. Recruiters prefer students with a good first degree in English."

Subtitling is not just about transliteration but also about capturing the essence of the original, something that a study and understanding of any literature supposedly encourages and hones.

Transcribers

A subtitler works for a specific medium - the visual medium. Similar to it is the job of a transcriber. Transcription services are often required by business houses, legal firms and medical companies. A transcriber is required to codify and convert oral guidelines into text documents.

Transcribers are also in demand in the pharmaceutical sector for simplified but accurate descriptions of medical terms, converting dictations of healthcare professionals and interpreting diagnostic test results.

Social media manager

A good social media manager needs a quiver full of skills and one among those would be copywriting. You could say the social media manager of a company is its voice in the virtual space. It means, she or he has to maintain a certain tone while communicating on the company's chosen social media platform or platforms - Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest - and at the same time write in an engaging manner. Because the written format is so brief, it becomes a greater challenge to be lucid. There is also the need to be accurate and politically correct.

Says Kirat Sen, founder of Klarusmedia, a digital media and marketing agency, "Being a digital marketing agency owner, I always look out for people who have a good vocabulary and it is the same while hiring a SMO [social media optimisation] specialist, as the person is responsible for communicating through various media platforms. So command over English has to be clear enough for even a layman to understand and for us to deliver it to our audience in the right way."