This creative writing class is a dream come true. There's even an addendum in the syllabus forbidding turning in fan fiction for the writing assignments.
As I'm considering doing such a course (in fact, would love to do one) do they give any idea as to what jobs/professions it may lead into?
None. I mean, it might be useful to get experience peer-editing the absolute shit you'll have to deal with if you're working towards becoming an editor, but a creative writing class is often the last thing you need if you're trying to become a published author. Unless the professor is excellent and the conditions are perfect, you're often better off (ironically enough) writing and distributing fan- or original fiction online in places where you'll get honest and constructive feedback if you're looking to improve your skills as a writer.
So, if I want a job...don't do the course? Surely it's as good as a normal English degree?
I meant in terms of getting a job related to your subject. If you want to get published as a fiction writer, you don't need a degree to do it (and getting a degree is both more expensive and not really better than other options). Taking a creative writing course (as in, a single class) isn't really anything one way or another (though it can be annoying for various reasons). As far as specialization in English goes, you're setting up your degree path in such a way that you're pretty much either going to be teaching or working in an unrelated field.
Specializing in creative writing doesn't make sense unless you want to spend your life writing about how to teach it and actually teaching it. Specializing in some other aspect of English lit at least means that you get to do your research and writing on things that interest you, rather than teaching methods. Unless you genuinely enjoy figuring out how to teach the authors of the 90% of the shit work in the world how to write better (or more likely, failing to teach the same).
That's how it is with all soft academia: you're pretty much locked into a career path of publishing your research and trying to get tenured at a half-decent university, so picking a specialization which is in demand
and personally interesting is the way to go (aka not medieval lit. in this example). But yes, in general any soft field is not good for getting a job unless you want to be a professor or you can figure out a creative solution -- this coming from a Liberal Arts major who spend four years taking English lit, political science, and history classes, and managed to parlay that into entry in a Masters program which is at best vaguely related
and both applicable to various work sectors and doctoral work.
tl;dr: If you want a job, get a degree in some programming or engineering field, or go to a trade school and spend less to get entry-level pay better than damn near any university degree.
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