What careers don’t get enough credit for being fulfilling, acceptable pay and a good work life balance?
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I’ve done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.
I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.
The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.
Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it’s free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.
If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.
Trades. Learn a trade. Electrician?
My kid fell for this. They promise you’ll get paid while you learn. What they don’t tell you is that IF you manage to pass the entrance exam (he did) you get put on a list for open apprenticeship positions, waiting to be called in at any moment. While you’re on that list you don’t get paid. If you do get a spot, contracts only last a couple of months. Then you go back on the list. Rinse and repeat. And the longer you’ve been in the union the higher up you get placed on the list. So the older members get placed before the newer ones no matter what number they were in line. This “join a trade” push is similar to the charter school scam, siphoning up state and federal training funds without delivering results.
Not to mention how it’s an old boys club who are just doing their own union minimums when they offer apprenticeship spots, not even the people in trades want to be part of the trades pipeline
The only people pushing trades are economists realizing the implications of all the trade electricians being near retiring age, and amgy Republicans who see it as a way to undercut the political trends that increasingly college educated folks have been pushing
I’m totally pushing learning a trade for my niece. Most trades can’t be outsourced or done with AI. And it’s pure gold again from South Park. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RcoGzT9QrTI
I’ve considered trades even with it being a full 180 from what I do now. Seems like location can vastly vary the experience. Build the base and bones of what society runs off of seems interesting though.
I work as an environmental engineer that does inspections of industrial, government, and military facilities. Every inspection I get to tour a different place and learn how it works and how things are made. I’ve gotten to see some amazing places like
-NASA rocket testing sites -shuttered nuclear weapons production processes, -the factory that makes all the flavoring for Dr pepper/potpourri/cherry/fake almond (it’s made starting with paint thinner, yikes) -refineries -military bases
It’s fascinating to both see how the world actually works, and how stuff is made, the benefits to society/vs costs to society and environment, and every place has its own site-specific culture. I find so many people take for granted how our whole society is so dependent on a few resources, industries, and expert people working together.
I get to use soft skills to interview people and figure out if they are being honest or hiding something, use my engineering and scientific skills to assess sites, and have a mix of inside/outside work.
My work also does some good - helping develop cases to bring to enforcement. My cases have resulted in changes that improve living conditions for people near these sites, the workers at them, or the environment.
Environmental engineering doesn’t pay as much as other disciplines like a senior software engineer or something. But it’s a good income and the work isn’t as subject to boom/bust cycles as other sectors because it’s driven by regulations more than profits.
Those people who go up alongside skyscrapers and wash the windows.
Honestly if heights aren’t an issue could be a great job.
How old are you? I am assuming you are more interested in the trades?
If you like to travel go work for an airline. You could work as an aircraft mechanic if you are willing to go to trade school or work in one of a few different jobs around logistics or baggage handling. None of these jobs are customer facing, are often Union and you get to fly the world for free. Just make sure you get on with an international carrier or switch to one as soon as possible.
Mid-30’s working for a tech company as middle level leadership for the support department and need to find something new. Trades are certainly a consideration, especially having a family member or two that have gone down that path.
Well, if you are good at following very precise directions and documentation. Then being an aircraft mechanic could be a thing. Yeah you need some mechanical savvy too, but it’s all procedures. The one thing is you will work nights for the first ten years. Most maintenance happens over night when the planes are sitting at the gate waiting for the next day.
The certificate is called airframe and powerplant or as most people know it A&P certified. It is actually two different certifications but you need both to get anywhere.
Something really boring-sounding at a corporation, like auditing the document reviews, or matching invoices with purchase orders, or filing regulatory paperwork.
Those all sound like jobs that will be replaced by enterprise AI SaaS stuff.
The middle is definitely dropping out. You want to either be hitting this stuff from a very far up view or a bottom view. I look at my employer we only have four positions left
- Assembler
- Engineer/manager
- One very overworked accountant
- Two service techs.
Where did all the secretaries, receptionists, drafters, skilled techs go? Email, voicemail, solidworks, standardized parts, and database software.
If you’re outgoing at all, waiting tables is the shit. I support a family of five working 32hrs a week. I meet interesting people, including celebrities. My coworkers are some of the kindest and funniest people you’ll ever meet. And I easily get 15K steps in every working day at a minimum. Free food and sometimes drinks, of course as a perk. And your job is to make people happy, to make their lives better in an immediate and appreciable way, so it’s very fulfilling work.
But it’s not for someone with thin skin.
Some days I miss serving so dearly but I am not an extrovert at all and I absolutely hated having my pay depend on my mood. I’m not very fond of faking it and sometimes it was just so draining. I’m so jealous of the people that can do it well for a long time though, my sister saved up so much money and I had colleagues walking out making 2 or 3x as much as I did, and I wasn’t bad off myself at all most days.
If you don’t mind the hours, working on a garbage truck can be really good from what I hear. But oldy very dangerous too. My cousins husband was a garbageman, then he fell off the truck (I forget how) and was seriously hurt permanently. But until then he really loved what he did.
If there’s can lifting involved, I would be worried about an unexpectedly heavy can fucking up my back.
I don’t think many places have guys ride on the back of the truck anymore. It’s less dangerous and I assume less expensive to have one guy driving a truck with a robot arm to grab the bins. I’m guessing the money is still fairly decent, although the company that does ours seems to be having some sort of staffing problem. We’re supposed to have trash and recycling collected on Mondays, but for the past few months usually one of them won’t get collected until the next day.
If you can get factory work somewhere with a union, the pay is high, stress is minimal, and the overtime is optional. I was an engineer at a place with a unionized shop. They went on strike, so the company recruited the office to work production until they could get real scabs in. Zero stress for two weeks.
The point is to find some place with a union. If you go somewhere without a union, the pay is shit, management will treat you like shit, and you’re expendable. Plus, mandatory overtime.
Depends on the nature. Working union at a car factory or some high end OEM maker is fun working union at a sheetmetal or bindery and it is far less fun. Comes down to how valuable the product you are making per unit weight.
