Descriptions of the Best-Paying Jobs

This part of the book provides a brief but information-packed description for each of the 285 best-paying jobs that appear on lists in this book. The descriptions in Part II are presented in alphabetical order. This makes it easy to look up any job you identify in a list from Part I that you want to learn more about. We used the most current information from a variety of government sources to create the descriptions. We designed the descriptions to be easy to understand, and the sample that follows- with an explanation of each of its component parts-will help you better understand and use the descriptions.

• Job Title: This is the job title for the job as defined by the U.S. Department of Labor and used in its O*NET database.


• Data Elements: The information on earnings, education, growth, annual openings, percentage of self-employed workers, and percentage of part-time workers comes from various government databases, as we explain earlier in this introduction.


• Industries in Which Income Is Highest: When you are applying for jobs, or even while you are planning your education or training, you can use this information to aim for industries where workers are paid best. This list includes only industries where 50 or more workers in the occupation are employed, unless total U.S. employment in the occupation is less than 10,000. This information, as well as that in the next topic, is derived from the Occupational Employment Survey of the Department of Labor.


• Metropolitan Areas Where Income Is Highest: If you are willing to relocate, this information may help you find where the pay is best. Of course, high-paying localities often have high living costs, but not always. This list includes only metropolitan areas where 50 or more workers in the occupation are employed, unless total U.S. employment in the occupation is less than 10,000.


• Summary Description and Tasks: The first part of each job description provides a summary of the occupation in bold type. It is followed by a listing of tasks that are generally performed by people who work in the job. This information comes from the O*NET database.


• Skills: The O*NET database provides data on 35 skills, so we decided to list only those that are most important for each job rather than list pages of unhelpful details. For each job, we identify any skill that is rated at a level that is not low and that is significantly higher than the average level for this skill for all jobs and that also is rated as of significant importance in the occupation. We order these skills by the amount by which their ratings exceed the average rating for all occupations, from highest to lowest. If there are more than eight such skills, we include only those eight with the highest ratings. We include up to 10 skills if scores were tied for eighth place. If no skill has a rating significantly higher than the average for all jobs, we say "None met the criteria." All skills are defined in the appendix.


• GOE Information: This information cross-references the Guide for Occupational Exploration (or the GOE), a system developed by the U.S. Department of Labor that organizes jobs based on interests. We use the groups from the fourth edition of the New Guide for Occupational Exploration, as published by JIST. This edition uses a set of interest fields based on the 16 career clusters developed by the U.S. Department of Education and used in a variety of career information systems. The description includes the major Interest Area the job fits into, its more-specific Work Group, and a list of related O*NET job titles that are in this same GOE Work Group. This information will help you identify other job titles that have similar interests or require similar skills. You can find more information on the GOE and its Interest Areas in the introduction to the lists of jobs based on interests in Part I.


• Personality Type: The O*NET database assigns each job to its most closely related personality type. Our job descriptions include the name of the related personality type as well as a brief definition of this personality type. You can find more information on the personality types in the introduction to the lists of jobs based on personality types in Part I.


• Education/Training Program(s): This part of the job description provides the name of the educational or training program or programs for the job. It will help you identify sources of formal or informal training for a job that interests you. To get this information, we used a crosswalk created by the National Crosswalk Service Center to connect information in the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) to the O*NET job titles we use in this book. We made various changes to connect the O*NET job titles to the education or training programs related to them and also modified the names of some education and training programs so they would be more easily understood.


• Related Knowledge/Courses: This entry in the job description will help you understand the most important knowledge areas that are required for the job and the types of courses or programs you will likely need to take to prepare for it. We used information in the Department of Labor's O*NET database for this entry. We went through a process similar to the one described for the skills (noted earlier) to end up with entries that are most important for each job.

Getting all the information we used in the job descriptions was not a simple process, and it is not always perfect. Even so, we used the best and most recent sources of data we could find, and we think that our efforts will be helpful to many people.