When Megan McArdle suggested those with doctoral degrees go after real jobs when tenure wasn’t an option, I suspect this is not quite what she meant.

Seminars on landing tenure-track jobs are common at annual gatherings of academic associations. And the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was no exception, with offerings on interviewing skills and more. But one of the most well-attended sessions here Friday centered on finding a position not in academe but somewhere else: government.

“Finding and Loving a Government Job: Part Deux,” was a follow-up to an unexpectedly popular session of the same name at AHA’s 2012 conference. Presented then as part of a workshop on the “Malleable Ph.D.,” which addressed alternative academic careers in light of the weak academic job market, AHA asked a number of historians with established careers in government to talk about the pros and cons of work in the public sector.

At the recent follow-up session — with the job market still weak, according to new figures from the AHA — panelists from the State and Defense Departments and Congress expressed few regrets at leaving the ivory tower. They encouraged graduate students and recent Ph.D.s to explore similar paths.

David Nickles, chief of the Asia and Middle East division at the State Department’s Office of the Historian, said he never intended to take a government job when he began his graduate program in history at Harvard University. But sensing that the market was “difficult” approaching his graduation in 2000, he said he “cast a wide net.” And he’s glad he did. Saying his office is regularly privy to classified documents never seen by academic historians, he added, “This kind of opportunity, of course, is what historians live for.”

And because many of his colleagues also come from academe, Nickles said, “It feels a lot like graduate school, but it’s less competitive and there’s more security.”

Similarly to Nickles, John A. Lawrence, former chief of staff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said his government job provided a front-row seat to history, such as when — parked below Rome’s Spanish Steps during a rainstorm in 2011 — he listened to Pelosi take a call from President Obama on his strategy regarding the Libyan civil war.

But unlike Nickles, Lawrence intended on a career in government while obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley some 40 years ago – much to the chagrin of some of his professors. One seemed “confused” when he asked for a recommendation for a government internship program, Lawrence said.