Now that 2010 is officially in the past, we can look forward to the year that is to come. This exercise can be particularly painful for those of us with impending May graduation dates (just typing those words made my blood run a little colder), but knowledge is power, and knowledge in this instance is CareerCast.com’s 200 best and worst jobs for 2011.
It’s no secret that traditional journalism jobs are considered career cancers to all but a few of us idealists. As this website puts it:
Some workers might find that their “dream job” actually ranks much further down the list – the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is especially true when it comes to employment.
To find Reporter (Newspaper), you have to click through several screens until you finally get to No. 188, right below jobs such as dairy farmer, sheet metal worker and garbage collector. Photojournalists only fare slightly better, coming in at No. 185, and Newscaster (broadcast journalist) lands at No. 128.
This poor ranking isn’t shocking to anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the constant bemoaning of the decline of the media. CareerCast says this about the jobs at the bottom of its list:
Jobs that fall into the bottom 20 out of all 200 surveyed professions tend to suffer from a combination of fatal flaws – low salaries, difficult working conditions, serious risk of injury or death, and poor employment prospects over the coming years.
That last reason—poor employment prospects—spells doom for journalism as a profession on this list. The other four core criteria are environment, income, stress and physical demands. Reporter scored 1106.250 in the environment category, which is below the more than 3,300 points the firefighter profession racked up for worst work environment. The midlevel income for reporters is computed at $34,000 (the lowest I saw was something like $18,000 for waiters and waitresses). Its stress level is fairly elevated at 44.750 for reasons such as deadlines, working in the public eye and competitiveness, but, in a slice of good news, the job scores very low on the physically demanding scale!
Like I said, nothing in this evaluation is unexpected. I already gave my vow of poverty my freshman year when I definitely decided on this career path. And I’m not exaggerating—with a salary of $30,000, it would take about seven years to just break even with what I paid to go to Duke. Money isn’t everything—right?
Maybe I'll have to live in a tent after graduation, but if that's the case, I will at least have some experience thanks to my time spent in Duke's famous Krzyzewskiville waiting to get into the annual Duke vs. UNC basketball game.