Which are the High-paying Niche Jobs?

With many industry sectors performing extremely well, folks – especially the young ones who still have to make long-term career decisions – have seriously started analyzing what the best paying jobs and careers are. And why not!

Some of the choices are well-known, the usual suspects such as doctors, lawyers, computer engineers, airline pilots etc. Unfortunately, the competition for jobs in these high-profile sectors are equally high, which means it might be smarter to figure out niche areas / domains that are high-paying but because of their niche status, have less competition, though will likely involve as much hard work as in any other high-flying sector.

In this board itself, I found a few excellent threads on high paying jobs; what I'm keen on knowing are high paying jobs in niche and if possible, relatively unknown domains.

Based on my preliminary researches, I found that the following niche sectors are relatively non-mainstream and could be very attractive from a salary perspective.

1. Charter yacht captain
2. Private club manager
3. Pharmacist
4. Air traffic controllers
5. Petroleum Engineer
6. Actuaries
7. Transportation Manager
8. Non-Retail Sales Supervisor
9. Detectives
10. Ship Engineers

I’d like to get the members’ opinions and updates on what they feel could be other high paying niche careers.

Thanks for your time

NS from Fincyclopedia - The Finance WWW Encyclopedia (http://www.ebpo.in/ref/ind/fin/fin.html)

I'm an actuary, so I'm always tickled to see those lists. Just last month I was reading a French magazine in an airport lounge. The cover story was "gold-plated jobs" and actuaries were listed there, too!

My advice is to find something you love and then you'll do it well. In my field there are actuaries who are CEOs who make tens of millions of $$ per year and there are pension actuaries who are frustrated with diminishing job opportunities (companies are dropping the types of plans that required their services). There are partners in consulting firms and there are actuaries who work at "drone" jobs for years and then retire.

Sure, you can start with a job in one of those categories rather than heading into teaching or social work (both noble fields but not the way to riches). But there are no easy roads to wealth and in every field there are people struggling to get by. Remember the guy with something like $180K debt from Embry-Riddle who was struggling to pay student loans working as a commuter pilot?

well at the risk of stating the obvious; why not financial planning?

now, as i go into this next paragraph, i am in this profession. ergo, i would be experiencing immense cognative dissonance if i thought the career sucked. however, just like i truly love my wife (and dont say it just cause it sounds nice) i also love my profession (and not simply cause i am married to it).

first off, sales is without a doubt the most lucrative FIELD of employment. as zig zigler has stated (correctly) on many occasions, nothing happens in America until a salesman sells something. as the ENGINE of our economy, sales deserves to be high paying.

within the field of "sales" there are sales of tangibles (like a car or a lear jet), there is sales of services (the mighty geek squad), and there is sales of intangibles (financial services). of all of these, the "sale" of an intangible is the hardest by far and as such has the highest compensation factor attached.

now, to be fair ... there are wonderful "sales" or financial people and there are TERRIBLE "sales" or financial people. but in fairness, there are good doctors and there are TERRIBLE doctors. however, the ENTIRE profession has a somewhat maniacal internal push for continuing education. not only is it "built" into the licensing, but we have professional standards groups that REQUIRE continuing education and even those amongs us EXPECT our peers to get edumacated and then to get more edumacated. what this does is create a strata of financial knowledge and when any heirarchy is in place, those at the apex are more valued (and generally more compensated) than those at the base.

now, i have purposely held this last part till the end ... though i rate it at the top of the list of "benefits" to this profession. you get to make a LOT of money. (no, that's not it ... read on) and with that LOT of money comes the opportunity to do a LOT of good stuff. i say this all the time, money is not money. it is "freedom" it is "control"! it allows you the freedom to have control over your life. to do the things that are important both to you; and to you as a human being. i am proud to say that my bretheren are usually very active in their communities. they usually have leadership positions in a charity or two. they are able to give generously of both their time and their funds (as we can only have sooooo much money and then it becomes ... just some more). their "nice" incomes allow them the freedom to spend LOTS of time with their husbands or wives and especially their children. in 22 years of service with the military, i NEVER got to truly "plan" a family vacation unless it was in conjunction with a military move. i NEVER could promise to attend this or that kid-function. anniversaries and birthdays??? in omage to Tony on his last night, "Fuged aboud-it".

this profession offers you all of that ... and the wonderful opportunity to help very deserving people understand all they need to understand to make smart decisions about money. and you know, perhaps THAT is the truest ROI for the entire profession!

And I think we should put in a word for any work having to do with the dead -- funeral homes, mortician, selling farmland for cemeteries (or getting licensed to own/run a cemetery), etc. We keep talking about the baby boomers who are retiring, but eventually we'll be talking about the baby boomers who are dying. Okay, morbid sense of humor aside, as they say, there are only two things you can't avoid, and that's death and taxes. Cashing in on death is quite lucrative, since most people don't care to be in that kind of business.

I think Air Traffic Controllers should be taken off the list. I have a few friends that are barely making ends meet because of the latest round of wage/benefit concessions that the federal government forced upon the newest generation of controllers. Controllers used to be well compensated but that is because of the amount of education, training, and stress involved.


I am glad airline pilot are not on that list. Runway corporate greed has turned the profession into something ugly. I am an airline pilot and I cannot afford to live on my own and I can barely pay my student loans back. I am in the process of trying to find a flexible second job to supplement my income.

1mo, your post about sales is a great example of being successful at doing what you do well. I know plenty of people who have struggled as financial advisors and I myself was a miserable failure at rainmaking for a consulting firm where I worked. But my current financial advisor built up a $50 million book of business in 3 years (prior experience trading commodities may have given him some well-heeled potential clients). When it works, it works well.

I read "Selling for Dummies" in my consulting days and wish I'd found it earlier. The author points out that selling is not evil in and of itself- most people like realtors for example, because they help you buy something you really want to buy. That's the way all selling should be.

you could be a marine dog fighter

How about blog writing? There's a niche for you. In the right circumstances, it is a niche service offered as part of online marketing. I only work part time and make very good money offering professional blog writing services to companies that use their blogs as marketing tools. If my time weren't as valuable as my money, I could do it full time, since the demand for professional bloggers is quite high in some industries, such as the real estate industry.

Even Airplane Pilots are quite in demand these days. There has been acute shortage of pilots in S-E Asian countries.

1mo, your post about sales is a great example of being successful at doing what you do well.

In almost every business - sales is where the money is at.

1. Charter yacht captain
2. Private club manager
3. Pharmacist
4. Air traffic controllers
5. Petroleum Engineer
6. Actuaries
7. Transportation Manager
8. Non-Retail Sales Supervisor
9. Detectives
10. Ship Engineers


Re pharmacists, they do make good money, however they also work long hours & are on their feet much of the time.

Re Petroleum engineers, it's my understanding they're away from home often, either on oil rigs or in foreign countries.

Re actuaries, you have to be very good at math. I was a major physics/math geek in college, and I found the actuarial exam to be quite challenging when I persued it.

Re actuaries, you have to be very good at math. I was a major physics/math geek in college, and I found the actuarial exam to be quite challenging when I persued it.

Don't feel bad, Sporkman. In his autobiography, the economist Milton Friedman says he tried them and gave them up, too. That anecdote made the rounds in actuarial circles very quickly!

That anecdote made the rounds in actuarial circles very quickly!

Heh heh, I bet!

I think any high paying jobs have their drawbacks. I could sit here and pick out a few things that are wrong with every profession. It all depends on if you like what you are doing and you feel that you're being compensated enough for doing what you love.

What dollar figure makes a job high-paying?

$250K a year.

$250K a year.

While one has a reasonable expectation of approaching $250k in a couple of the jobs listed, I don't think that $250k is a reasonable expection for an average person in any of the 10 or so listed. So by your definition, I don't think ANY of those meet the "high-paying" threshold.

Of course high compensation is a matter of perspective. A person making $50000 could be considered highly compensated by someone making $12000. Also, the COLA and benefits would effect the end results. So, with that said, the IRS continues to take the fun out of everything and offer us a written definition:

Highly compensated employee. A highly compensated employee is an individual who:

Owned more than 5% of the interest in your business at any time during the year or the preceding year, or
For the preceding year, received compensation from you of more than $95,000 (if the preceding year is 2005, $100,000 if the preceding year is 2006 or 2007) and, if you so choose, was in the top 20% of employees when ranked by compensation.
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p560/ch01.html#d0e682

Obviously, this amount could debatable on many levels.

While one has a reasonable expectation of approaching $250k in a couple of the jobs listed, I don't think that $250k is a reasonable expection for an average person in any of the 10 or so listed. So by your definition, I don't think ANY of those meet the "high-paying" threshold.

that wasnt my list.

also, 250K is not an average income so i would most certainly not expect that it would be made by the average person. before i get hammered for this statement, i define average in the mathmatical sense ... not in value OF the person. most people are of equal intrinsic value.

No, you're absolutely correct, 1MO. This was the question you answered:

What dollar figure makes a job high-paying?
Not, "What should an Average Joe expect to earn?"

On another note, am I the only one whose text starts as Veranda, then switches to Arial the next paragraph?

my humble recommendation: all future posts that reference anything i have said previously should begin with: You're absolutely correct, 1MO.

while not selling DIRECTLY, i found it interesting that the following jobs on the original list posted have strong aspects of sales to them:

1. Charter yacht captain ... clearly the high customer service facilitates future sales.
2. Private club manager ... must outline the benefits of the club and support closing the sale for membership.
3. Pharmacist ... not directly applicable to sales.
4. Air traffic controllers ... not applicable.
5. Petroleum Engineer ... may or may not have application to sales, most likely not.
6. Actuaries ... either they or their sales crew directly impact customer development - sales!
7. Transportation Manager ...not directly applicable to sales.
8. Non-Retail Sales Supervisor ... sales!
9. Detectives ... not sales of a product per se, but uses the sales process aggressively.
10. Ship Engineers ... not salesy ... but really sucky job no matter the pay!

Air traffic controllers earn relatively high pay and the highest 10 percent earned more than $139,210.

the highest 10% annual earnings for detectives and criminal investigators is $86,010.

highest 10 percent of financial advisors earned more than $113,490. i added this because this is a financial forum and the numbers were sorta surprising to me. there is a large failure rate in the industry so that will drag the numbers down. also, there is significant residual income in the business but that is probably not factored either.

You're right about the sales aspect of the actuarial profession, 1mo- some of the biggest earners are partners in large consulting firms. How did they make partner? SALES!

There are also a few who are CEOs and, really, if you do it right, that's marketing as well, since many CEOs deal personally with the heavyweight customers and go to industry events where their primary purpose is to enhance the image of the company.

^^ Great thoughts Athena. I think people overlook that the top 10% of salaries are usually earned by people who go above and beyond the normal amount of sales or clients.

Be good at what you do, make money at it, and that is the most high paying job you could ever have.

jIM

A nice thought but I think your criteria is a little short. As a teenager I was a petroleum transfer engineer (pumped gas). Service actually mattered back then. I was very good at it. I enjoyed it, and I made money. High paying? Nope.

Pharmacists make about 90K. If you are killing yourself (90h/wk) then you can do 145K or so.

IMHO: for major Metro areas, a high paying job is about 200K/year or more.

Medical or health line jobs.