Best Jobs

MONEY Magazine and Salary.com recently came out their list of best jobs in America. I find lists like this fascinating because first of all I like to find where my job fits in on the list and then look at what jobs are considered the best and worst.

First of all it took me a long time to find “reporter”. It wasn’t listed on the initial top 50 but that really didn’t surprise me. I would have been more surprised if it was on the top 50 list. I had to click on the link that listed the next 166 jobs outside the top 50 and that’s where I found reporter at 195 out of 216. Here are some other jobs that were also bottom dwellers.

185 – Funeral directors

186 – Insurance agent

194 – Librarian

196 – Sociologist

201 - Historian

Rankings are based on several different things including: stress, hours, environment, creativity, compensation and job growth potential. There also has to be at 15,000 people in the country who do the job. So that is why a baseball player making $20,000,000 a year to play a game isn’t on the list because that would be number one for me. Based on that here are the “best jobs” in America.

1 – Software engineer

2 – College professor

3 – Financial advisor

4 – Human resources manager

5 – Physician assistant

6 – Market research analyst

7 – Computer/IT analyst

8 – Real estate appraiser

9 – Pharmacist

10 – Psychologist

As I look at the list I wonder what makes these jobs so great. If I had to pick the top ten jobs I wouldn’t have guessed any of those, well maybe financial advisor. The average pay according to the list is around $82,000 a year and the job growth forecast for the next 10 years shows tremendous potential. I thought it would be interesting to interview someone who had the top job. Then as I was sitting in the newsroom thinking about who to call and interview I thought, “why not contact someone who does the top 2 jobs.” So I looked up college professors at the University of Utah who teach Computer Science and found Bob Kessler who is a college professor and teaches software engineering. When I told him what I was thinking of doing for a story he laughed but I figured that would happen but it’s a different way to tell the story. The faculty up at the U of U is actually showing students the list and telling them that software engineering is the way to go.

So now here is the list of worst jobs in America. Okay maybe they aren’t the worst but according to the 216 that were on the report these are the bottom 10 jobs.

207 – Respiratory therapy technicians

208 – First-line supervisors

209 – Legislators (ha ha, at least reporters made it above legislators)

210 – New accounts clerks

211 – Electrical and electronics drafters

212 – Industrial production managers

213 – Computer-controlled machine tool operators

214 – Mathematicians

215 – Fire inspectors and investigators

216 – Semiconductor processors

While some of these jobs pay well according to the report the job growth potential over the next 10 years is very low so that is why these jobs rank at the bottom. Of course having the best and worst job all depends on the day and stress level at work.