The 15 Best Jobs That Help People

 

Careers for do-gooders

We spend just about every waking moment doing our jobs, or so it feels. So it's understandable if you want your career to really mean something.

Granted, most jobs, even the most obscure, add value to someone’s life and society at large, or else the opening wouldn’t exist. But some careers really allow professionals to directly help others. If that’s what you’re looking for, check out these careers that help people from the 2021 U.S. News Best Jobs ranking. Salary data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The 15 best jobs that help people:

• Financial Advisor.
• Orthotist and Prosthetist.
• Physical Therapist.
• Marriage and Family Therapist.
• Occupational Therapist.
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon.
• Substance Abuse and Behavioral Disorder Counselor.
• Anesthesiologist.
• Physical Therapist Assistant.
• Orthodontist.
• Dentist.
• Speech-Language Pathologist.
• Physician.
• Nurse Practitioner.
• Physician Assistant.

Financial Advisor

Median Annual Salary: $87,850
Education Required: Bachelor’s degree

If you can advise someone on how to manage money better, you’re truly doing them a service.

Of course, bad financial advice could potentially wreck their life. Which is why many financial firms require or encourage financial advisors to become licensed or get an advanced degree. To be successful in this career, you truly need to understand how markets and finances work.

Financial advisors may have a stressful career at times, especially if the economy is suffering. Still, if all goes well, you’ll help clients increase their wealth – and hopefully increase your own bottom line, too.

Learn more about financial advisors.

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Median Annual Salary: $68,410
Education Required: Master’s degree

This is a job with the capacity to truly change someone’s life. Some people, due to genetics or perhaps a turn of very bad luck, lose a limb or struggle to walk. These situations may be permanent or temporary, such as when a patient needs braces to help them walk while a bone heals.

It’s your job to help decide what type of braces someone might need to walk, or what sort of artificial limb a patient may need. No patient’s body is the same, so this isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation. Do your job well, and you’ll truly improve patients’ lives.

Learn more about orthotists and prosthetists.

Physical Therapist

Median Annual Salary: $89,440
Education Required: Doctorate

Physical therapists, sometimes called PTs, specialize in helping people with difficulty moving. They teach patients, who may have chronic conditions, illness or injuries, techniques to help them move better, minimize pain, restore function and prevent more health issues involving mobility.

It may sound pretty straightforward, but you really are changing someone’s life when you help them learn to move around better and with less pain.

Physical therapists usually have an undergraduate degree and then get a Doctor of Physical Therapy degree. They must be licensed in each state that they practice.

Learn more about physical therapists.

Marriage and Family Therapist

Median Annual Salary: $49,610
Education Required: Master’s degree

When the stress and tension between a married couple or family becomes too much to bear, that’s when you’ll be called in.

Marriage and family therapists help couples and families manage clashes and disagreements and, with any luck, help strengthen their relationships. Some couples and families really struggle to get along. You’re a kind of referee, helping each see the other’s side and assisting them with coming up with decisions everyone can live with.

You may run your own practice or work for a health care provider or perhaps the government.

These professionals need master’s degrees and licenses.

Learn more about marriage and family therapists.

Occupational Therapist

Median Annual Salary: $84,950
Education Required: Master's degree

If you take on this profession, you’ll be working with patients to help them complete the daily tasks of life. That isn’t easy for patients with physical, mental, emotional or developmental disabilities, and sometimes, patients have a combination of these issues.

As an occupational therapist, you’ll help your patients create a plan of attack to complete these tasks and help them meet certain challenges, which can be anything from holding a fork to using a calculator.

You might be working in a hospital, rehabilitation center, a school system, a medical office or even directly in a client’s home.

Learn more about occupational therapists.

Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon

Median Annual Salary: $208,000
Education Required: Doctorate

This career pays very well because it takes many years of hard work studying and training to become a surgeon. Plus, you have all those student loans. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons perform surgeries on the face, mouth and jaw. It often can take about 12 years before you receive your medical degree.

It'll be worth it. One day, you may be helping a patient battle oral cancer; another day, you may be repairing a cleft lip.

Is this a job in which you'll make a difference? Absolutely. Just look at the smiles on your patients’ faces when you see them after surgery.

Learn more oral and maxillofacial surgeons.

Substance Abuse and Behavioral Disorder Counselor

Median Annual Salary: $46,240
Education Required: Bachelor’s degree

For people suffering from addiction, often to alcohol or drugs, these therapists can literally be a life-saver.

If you take on this job, you may save lives. It’ll be a slow process, of course. No one beats an addiction quickly or easily, but the people who do shake off alcoholism or a drug problem often do it thanks to substance abuse and behavioral disorder counselors.

No day or patient will be quite the same, and if you take on this career, you’ll probably counsel patients one-on-one or in group settings to help set treatment and recovery goals. This is a profession that can be emotionally rewarding (you’re saving lives) but also grueling (you probably won’t save them all, and you’re working with some people who are at the lowest point of their lives).

How do you enter this profession? You’ll likely need at least a bachelor’s degree, many hours of supervised clinical experience and a license to practice therapy.

Learn more about substance abuse and behavioral disorder counselors.

Anesthesiologist

Median Annual Salary: $208,000
Education Required: Doctorate

If you’re an anesthesiologist, you’re the doctor who administers general or regional anesthesia so that a surgeon or another doctor can conduct invasive procedures without the patient feeling any pain. You’re doing work so other physicians can do their work.

It isn’t easy. You'll monitor a patient’s vital signs and life functions before, during and after the surgery, so it's a very serious job to take on.

Learn more about anesthesiologists.

Physical Therapist Assistant

Median Annual Salary: $58,790
Education Required: Associate degree

Physical therapist is on this list, but it’s such a stellar profession that physical therapist assistants make the cut as well.

As you might expect, a physical therapist assistant works closely with a physical therapist – and patients. You’ll help the physical therapist execute a plan to help a patient. That might involve, for instance, assisting and monitoring the patient while they do exercises designed to improve their joints and mobility.

Learn more about physical therapist assistants.

Orthodontist

Median Annual Salary: $208,000
Education Required: Doctorate

You could say an orthodontist is a dentist 2.0. It's essentially a dentist who specializes in straightening teeth and fixing misshapen jaws. Got an overbite or an underbite? An orthodontist will help with that.

The hours are usually pretty good, and many, if not most, orthodontists don’t work weekends. Plus, they definitely help people. Straightening teeth is a gradual process, so many patients probably take it for granted and, since they’re shelling out a lot of money for treatment, don’t think to thank their orthodontist.

Learn more about orthodontists.

Dentist

Median Annual Salary: $155,600
Education Required: Doctorate

For years, you dreaded going to the dentist – or maybe you enjoyed the experience. Either way, you’re coming full circle if you take this job. After years of checkups, now you’ll be the one encouraging patients to brush regularly and floss. You’ll also be filling cavities and extracting teeth and, in general, taking care of people’s mouths.

If you own a practice, you’ll also be running a business. It’s a profession that comes with a lot of responsibility, with employees who depend on you, and, of course, your patients.

Dentists generally get an undergraduate degree, and then move onto a four-year dental program at a dental school accredited by the Commission on Dental Accreditation, where they earn a doctoral degree in dental medicine or dental surgery.

Learn more about dentists.

Speech-Language Pathologist

Median Annual Salary: $79,120
Education Required: Master’s degree

When people struggle with their speech, they enlist the help of a speech-language pathologist. If you make this your career, you’ll help people find their voice. That’s something you can feel great about every evening when you return home.

These professionals assess and treat communication and swallowing problems that may have come about due to an injury, disease or developmental delay. They teach children and adults how to make sounds and develop their swallowing muscles.

This career requires a master’s degree and often a license.

Learn more about speech-language pathologists.

Physician

Median Annual Salary: $206,500
Education Required: Doctorate

Physicians can choose from many specialties. There are physicians who specialize in delivering babies, for example, while others become ER doctors.

One thing is for sure: Physicians help patients every day. They may stop a disease in its tracks by diagnosing it early. They may save someone's life; a lot of drama can happen, even at a general practitioner's office. Regardless of what type of medicine you practice, you'll always be guiding people on the right path toward better health.

Learn more about physicians.

Nurse Practitioner

Median Annual Salary: $109,820
Education Required: Master’s degree

The job of nurse practitioner can be confusing to somebody who isn’t in the know – is this a career in which you’re a nurse? A doctor?

Something in between. If you’re a nurse practitioner, you won’t study as much as a physician, so you’ll have fewer student loans (but, alas, also a lower salary), and you will probably work under the guidance of a doctor. Still, you’ll be a registered nurse who can take patient histories, perform exams, order labs, prescribe medicine and do a host of activities that doctors generally handle.

Most importantly, you’ll be helping a lot of people every day. Not everyone can say that.

Learn more about nurse practitioners.

Physician Assistant

Median Annual Salary: $112,260
Education Required: Master’s degree

The profession of physician assistant is one in which you may earn half of what a physician makes, but you may be happier. Physician assistant is the No. 1 job on the 2021 U.S. News Best Jobs ranking. Physician came in at No. 5.

Why is the job of physician’s assistant such a wonderful career? Well, you’re directly helping patients every day by diagnosing illnesses and assisting in surgeries and performing procedures and generally doing a lot of what a physician does. But you don’t have all of the pressure that a physician sometimes has; ultimately, you are generally working under the guidance of a physician or surgeon.

In any case, you will be helping patients get healthier. Because of what you’re doing in the day, you can sleep very well at night.

Learn more about physician assistants.

The 30 Fastest-Growing Jobs And Careers For The Next 10 Years

Contributed by Jack Kelly

If you are starting out your career or have been in the workforce for a while, it's important to look into the future. Hockey star Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” It's the same way with your career. You  need to look forward. Anticipate the emerging trends. Figure out how you can leverage your skills to pivot toward a fast-growing career instead of being stuck with a job that’s going nowhere.

I write about the monthly jobs report compiled by the United States Department of Labor. Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows how many new jobs were created or lost. The data captures a moment in time. This division, as you can imagine, has access to a wealth of information and statistics about jobs and careers. 

While most economists, Wall Street professionals and nerdy guys like me pay attention to the monthly jobs reports, the BLS has some compelling reading for proactive people who strongly desire to advance their careers. It has put together lists of the fastest-growing jobs and careers. Additionally, the BLS shares how much these roles pay.

Before we go into the jobs, let’s look at the sectors that offer rapid growth. To start with, the BLS anticipates that overall employment in the U.S. will grow from “153.5 million to 165.4 million over the 2020–30 decade, an increase of 11.9 million jobs.” 

Employment in the restaurant, bar, travel, hotel and what’s referred to as the “leisure and hospitality sector,” as a catch-all, is projected to increase at the fastest rate. This will occur in response to the the country’s reopening and recovery. During the pandemic, workers in the leisure and hospitality space were one of first to lose their jobs or get furloughed. Now, due to nearly insatiable demand, the jobs have come roaring back. The bounceback has been so enormous that restaurants and businesses complain they can’t find enough workers. Large corporations, such as Walmart, Amazon and Target, have had to respond by offering sign-on bonuses, increases in wages and free tuition to entice people to join their companies.

As you can imagine, in the current and eventually post-pandemic environment, healthcare will take precedence. Understandably, concerns about our health and safety will propel the healthcare and social assistance sector’s continued growth. This space is “projected to add the most jobs of all industry sectors, about 3.3 million jobs over 2020–30.” 

A rising demand for the care of an aging Baby-Boomer population, longer life expectancies and continued growth in the number of patients with chronic conditions will call for a steady need for healthcare providers.

Technological advancements are expected to keep growing at a fast pace. We see an acceleration in artificial intelligence, robotics, self-driving vehicles, cryptocurrencies, gaming, virtual reality, online collaborative video platforms and the metaverse. There will be needs across the gamut, ranging from large tech giants to scrappy startups. As business continues moving online, demand will outstrip the supply of suitable job candidates. 

According to the BLS, “Computer and mathematical occupations are expected to see fast employment growth as strong demand is expected for IT security and software development, in part due to increased prevalence of telework spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic.” The downside is that technological changes facilitating increased automation are expected to result in declining employment for office and administrative support occupations.

Tangentially, there will be a large need for people to interpret the vast amount of data to help business leaders make smart, informed decisions. Demand for new products, such as the Internet of Things, and for analyzing and interpreting large datasets are also expected to contribute to fast employment growth for statisticians, information security analysts and data scientists.

We are likely to see a retirement boom. This will open up opportunities for younger workers. Demographics show that by 2030, Baby Boomers will be at least 65 years old. As they age, many will start retiring or leave the workforce. The BLS states, “The increasing share of people ages 65 and older contributes to a projected labor force growth rate that is slower than much of recent history, as well as a continued decline in the labor force participation rate, because older people have lower participation rates compared with younger age groups.”

Other trends, such as moving toward environmentally friendly initiatives, the massive adoption of pets during the pandemic, a mental health crisis, working from home and the desire to improve our health and lives, will create all sorts of new opportunities.  

Here are the jobs that the U.S. Labor Department and BLS project will be the fastest growing jobs going into 2030, along with the median annual pay:

• Wind turbine service technicians: $56,230
• Nurse practitioners: $111,680
• Solar photovoltaic installers: $46,470
• Statisticians: $92,270
• Physical therapist assistants: $59,770
• Information security analysts: $103,590
• Home health and personal care aides: $27,080
• Medical and health services managers: $104,280
• Data scientists and mathematical science occupations, all other: $98,230
• Physician assistants: $115,390
• Epidemiologists: $74,560
• Logisticians: $76,270
• Speech-language pathologists: $80,480
• Animal trainers: $31,520
• Computer numerically controlled tool programmers: $57,740
• Genetic counselors: $85,700
• Crematory operators and personal care and service workers, all other: $28,420
• Operations research analysts: $86,200
• Actuaries: $111,030
• Health specialties teachers, postsecondary: $99,090
• Forest fire inspectors and prevention specialists: $42,150
• Interpreters and translators: $52,330
• Athletic trainers: $49,860
• Respiratory therapists: $62,810
• Substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors: $47,660
• Food preparation and serving related workers, all other: $27,080
• Nursing instructors and teachers, postsecondary: $75,470
• Woodworkers, all other: $33,630
• Phlebotomists: $36,320
• Software developers and software quality assurance analysts and testers: $110,140

How to choose a career path in three easy steps

 

Choosing a career path doesn’t have to feel like staring into a crystal ball. Try our step-by-step guide.

If you ask someone to sketch out an ideal career path, they’ll probably draw a straight line, rising upward like a backslash. You decide what you want to be when you grow up, go to vocational school or college or snag an entry-level job, and then hop up the professional ladder rung by rung, promotion by promotion, like some kind of business-savvy Super Mario.

But that’s not what a typical career path looks like anymore; work has changed. Nowadays, our career paths take us on scenic strolls through meadows, daring passes over ravines, winding climbs to majestic mountain peaks. And, yes, sometimes they take us down a rocky road, and we trip, only to regain our footing with a little more experience to carry down the trail. (By the way, here’s how to explain those job slipups in a job interview.)

The point is not that you can’t chart the course of your own career path. It’s that we have to be brave, embrace the unknown and embark with as many tools to help on the journey as possible.

With that in mind, let’s talk about how to choose your career path.

What is a career path?

A career path is the broad course you want your professional life to take. It could begin with a destination — like a dream job or a personal goal related to work, such as home ownership or owning your own business — or start with something clear, like an interest in a certain field, and then wind into the mist ahead of you, leading somewhere you’ve yet to discover. Each professional move you make — every class you take, job you work, raise you earn — is a milestone in the story of your career path. And usually, the best stories surprise you.

Some people have a singular vision for their professional lives. They know exactly where they want to live and work and set about getting there like a dad with an old-fashioned atlas planning the route to the family vacation. Say you want to work in administration at a school. If you’re one of these lucky, clear-eyed people, you might chart your career path something like this:

Get a bachelor’s degree in education.

Get a job as a teacher at a public school.

Take on more responsibilities as a department chair.

Get promoted to an assistant principal role and improve school performance.

Finally, snag that principal job.

Congrats to this talented educator! But for most of us, things aren’t so clear-cut. Planning a career path can feel like staring into a crystal ball, wondering where life will lead. So let’s talk about how we can take the lead in our own lives.

Choosing a career path

You don’t have to map out your entire life from birth to death to get started on a career path. Let’s take it a step at a time.

1. Start small

If we were to ask your best friend what makes you happiest, what would they say? OK, so watching baseball might not seem like the most helpful answer. But what can you learn about yourself from it, other than the obvious fact that you like sports? Do you enjoy the social aspect of the game? Maybe you like organizing the watch parties, getting all the snacks together. Maybe you’re all about the math — where we see athletes running around a diamond, you see equations, formulas, possibilities.

The point is, even if you don’t have a dream job in mind just yet, you do have interests, skills, inclinations. Ask yourself, ideally, would you rather work on a team, or hole up on your own? Would you like to work with numbers, or food, or creative people, or your hands?

You can’t know what your dream job would be until you know yourself. Start there. Make a list of all your past jobs, education and experience. Then list all the skills you learned from them. Which skills felt the best to use? These days, skills are the most important factor in getting hired.

All you need to do is focus on what makes you, well, you. Start this journey with a small step.

2. Look down the road

By now, you’ve identified your core abilities, mapped out your values and explored your general interest in this or that field. Now it’s time to do some concrete research.

What kinds of jobs are available in the field you like? Read job descriptions carefully to see which roles sound right for you. If a certain job catches your eye, it’s time to reverse-engineer the process of getting there. These questions will help you chart your course:

How many years of experience does someone need to do this job?

What kind of education is required to do this job?

What does this job typically pay, and does that align with my life goals?

What jobs did people in this position work previously?

With the answers to these questions in mind, try to answer that dreaded interview question: Where do you see yourself in five years? Make a rough sketch of how long you’ll need to study, or work in other roles, before arriving at your destination.

3. Think big-picture

Remember everything we said about how a good hike doesn’t just beeline to a destination, but takes detours? How that’s what makes it a good hike? Here’s where that really comes into play.

Odds are, you are not going to decide what kind of job you want today and walk right into it tomorrow. That’s OK. You’re playing the long game. If your dream job means you need to go to school, and going to school means you need to get a part-time job, look for a part-time job where you could flex some skills you’d use in your ultimate goal — even if the job seems unrelated. If you want to be a realtor, you can gain plenty of experience in communication, persuasion and economics by working as a sales associate or customer service representative.

Don’t get discouraged if the road is long. Even if it feels like you’re walking in the wrong direction, you’re ultimately taking steps toward your goals.