Systems engineer deemed best job in America
A deep and detailed survey by Focus.com concludes that the best job in the United States is a tech job: systems engineer. No. 2: physician assistant. No. 3: college professor.
If you're a systems engineer who wonders whether you've chosen the right profession, I bring you good news.
Please take a deep breath, stand up, and be prepared to leap so high, you will touch the sky. Then you will, perhaps, want to touch the Skyy. For a survey has declared that systems engineer is the best job in America.
Focus.com, perhaps spurred on by the grumbling that can be heard from so many places of work in the world, performed this most important of tasks.
The site first looked at more than 7,000 jobs. It then poured its eyes over numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It selected jobs that would grow by 10 percent or more in the next decade, according to these statistics. Oh, and it had to be a job that required at least a bachelor's degree.
It then excluded any job in which the median pay was less than $65,000 for those it deemed "experienced workers." It also excluded any job that had less than 10,000 openings.
But these dedicated happiness seekers didn't stop there. For the top 100, they erased jobs that didn't seem to fare so well during recessionary times.
For the top 50, they surveyed 35,000 workers and asked them to rate their current employment on a variety of factors that might be described as "quality of life." The top 50 were then placed in order, according to long-term growth, pay, security, projected openings, and other human factors (I'm guessing things like quality of coffee machines and loathing for the bosses.)
To pick the top 10, Focus.com was a lot more thorough that the judges on Miss World. It spoke to industry experts and people who actually held down these lucky, lucky job titles.
If you're wondering what jobs were beaten out by the joys of system engineering, well, second came physician assistant. Have you seen how much money these people make? Quite astounding. In third place was college professor. Yes, really. Followed by nurse practitioner, IT project manager, and--breathe now, breathe--CPA.
Please, all you fortunate people who engineer systems on a daily basis--you who make things happen when all those around you have no idea what things to make happen, nor how to make them happen. You have the most happening jobs in America. Please tell us how you got so lucky. Please tell us how it feels. The rest of us would really like to know.