Wall Street is disappointed by unemployment data inflated by census jobs—the Dow fell over 3 percent to under 10000 on Friday. The Daily Beast ranks the coolest career paths that are actually hiring.
Confidence in the economic recovery is still low, if the latest employment numbers are anything to go by. Even though the unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent, hiring fell well below projections in May, according to Labor Department data released Friday. Payrolls rose 431,000 last month, but that number was inflated by a surge of 411,000 hires by the government for temporary workers during the 2010 census. Economists had projected a gain of 536,000 jobs, Bloomberg reports, and Wall Street pushed the Dow down 323.31 points to close at 9931.97 on Friday. All this indicates that the economic recovery could yet slow further. “It’s going to be a long haul,” one economist said. “We really aren’t adding many jobs. We’ve lost some momentum in the economy and final sales clearly aren’t enough to generate job growth.”
Click the Image to View Our Gallery of Dream Jobs
Ah, to dream the impossible dream. Remember when you were 10 years old and wanted to be Indiana Jones? Or maybe you were more of a Philip Marlowe type, snooping around your neighbors’ trashcans for something incriminating. Recessions and periods of unemployment are seen by some as a hidden blessing, as a chance to reevaluate life’s choices and travel down new paths. Throwing caution to the wind isn’t for everyone, but if you’re one of the lucky few able to drop everything and start anew, we have your options.
The Daily Beast set out to find 10 “dream jobs”—the kind of career fields that cause others to ooh and ahh—that also project healthy employment growth and projected job openings over the next few years. No small feat given today’s unemployment rate, which continues to hover at a hefty 10 percent.
Our methodology is as follows. We started by ranking more than 1,000 occupations based on each job’s respective projected employment change from 2008-2018, sourced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We then ranked these 1,000 occupations by the projected number of job openings over the decade due to growth and replacement needs, using 2008 employment numbers as a baseline of comparison. Sifting through the jobs that showed potential for growth, we picked out the ones that wowed us—through their uniqueness, difficulty, or glamour.
The result is a list of the 10 jobs of your dreams. These jobs aren’t always easy to break into, they can take a lot of work to reach the upper echelons, and they encompass a swath of education levels and hurdles to entry. More important than anything, though, is that they’re jobs that will stoke passions while keeping bill collectors away from your door.
Clark Merrefield reported and wrote this ranking, with assistance from Lauren Streib.