While many of the new jobs created since the recession are persistently low-paying retail and restaurant positions with no benefits and little chance of advancement, the growing health care sector offers career paths that lead to generous compensation and a secure future. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest ten-year projections for industry growth, dating from 2012 to 2022, it projected that the health care and social assistance industry will produce one in three of the new jobs in the U.S. over the next decade. Extended longevity and an aging population, combined with expanding insurance coverage under Obamacare, are increasing the demand for many health professionals, from dental hygienists to physical therapists. That means nearly 5 million new jobs in the sector will be created by 2022, according to the BLS.
But if the field attracts you, what path should you take? CareerCast, a nine-year-old job search website in Carlsbad, CA, just released a list of the 10 jobs it deems to be the best in health care. These jobs don’t pay in the mid-six figures commanded by, say, a heart surgeon, but the top jobs like pharmacist and podiatrist pay more than $100,000, and they don’t involve excessive stress or harsh working conditions, according to CareerCast. The BLS projects that all the jobs on the list will grow at a healthy clip of at least 14% by 2022. It projects that the fastest-growing job, physical therapist, will expand by 36% in the next decade.
CareerCast doesn’t rank the 10 jobs it deems best, but we’ve listed them in the slide show above starting with the highest salary, putting pharmacist, with an average annual salary of $116,670 at the top. The growth rate for that profession is 14% by 2022.
Tony Lee, publisher of CareerCast, explains that the health care jobs ranking comes from an annual study he used to compile for The Wall Street Journal, starting 17 years ago. Lee and the study moved to CareerCast when that site launched nine years ago. Two academics from the University of Wisconsin, together with CareerCast staffers, rate each of 200 jobs according to five different core criteria, using data from the BLS, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the American Dental Hygienist’s Association. Lee and his team add data to the study year-round.
In addition to income and hiring outlook, they look at the work environment, including hazards like toxic fumes or exposure to the elements, physical demands like heavy lifting and stress, including life-threatening risks, competitiveness and travel. They give the highest ratings to jobs with promising income and hiring outlooks, and high points for a pleasant work environment, low stress and modest physical demands.
CareerCast puts out its list without a top to bottom ranking, but we’ve decided to order them in terms of high to low salary. At the top of that list: The highest-paying of the healthcare jobs ranked by CareerCast this year: Pharmacist, with a median salary of $116,700 and projected growth by 2022 of 14%, according to the BLS. Pharmacists must complete a four-year “PharmD” program after getting a bachelor’s or associate’s degree with undergraduate coursework in physics, chemistry, biology and calculus. While the pharmacists at my local Duane Reade appear to toil under fluorescent lights on their feet for eight-hour shifts while demanding and sometimes desperate customers plead for medication advice to help them with constipation and sleeplessness, Lee insists that most pharmacists get satisfaction from helping patients, and have “a lot of freedom and flexibility in the job.” He says the vast majority of pharmacists work in hospitals, which are not as stressful as drugstore chains, though I wonder about that too, having waited in long lines for drugs at pressured hospital pharmacy counters. UPDATE: A commenter who is a pharmacist wrote in to say that it's "unheard of" these days to get into pharmacy school without a bachelor's degree, because of severe competition. He adds that hospital pharmacists tend to be clinical analysts who work closely with doctors to "engineer therapeutic outcomes." He says "machines and technicians do the dispensing." See his called-out comment below.
Lee adds that the profession is growing as many people in the career approach retirement age and fewer people study to become pharmacists, opening up jobs. If you’re a pharmacist, I invite you to post a comment here and let me know how you feel about your job. In the past, I’ve covered CareerCast rankings that have generated lots of controversy, like a “least stressful jobs” list that put university professor at the top of the ranking and elicited 573 comments, from mostly angry professors who said they were stressed to the hilt.
The second-highest-paying job on the list: podiatrist. Though working on people’s feet all day seems like it could be difficult and even onerous, Lee insists that podiatrists are trained to perform surgery so they can mix up their routines. The field has also had some attrition, in part because the pay is not as high as that of specialties like radiology or neurosurgery. “There aren’t enough podiatrists to fill all the positions,” says Lee, yielding a projected growth rate of 23% by 2022. Podiatrists don't go to medical school but rather earn a D.P.M. (doctor of podiatric medicine) which takes four years to complete including two years of clinical rotations.
In third place: physical therapist with a growth rate of 36%, the highest on the list. Median salaries for physical therapists are $79,860. According to the American Physical Therapists Association, to be licensed, physical therapists must complete a three-year post-graduate Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) degree after earning a bachelor’s, though some allow a three-year pre-professional undergraduate program and then the three-year DPT degree. Some DPT programs take students straight out of high school, though they require students to pass some undergraduate courses as well as DPT requirements. To be a licensed physical therapist you must pass a state exam. Along with the good salary and high growth rate, Lee says people find physical therapy to be a rewarding profession. “You’re working one-on-one with people who are thankful for your help. You also can manage your own schedule.” I’m skeptical of that last claim and welcome comments from physical therapists.
Lee maintains that high-demand jobs mean low stress levels. “Any time you have a profession where the hiring demand is high, the employer tends not to put people into overly stressful positions because the people will be likely to leave and go to less stressful positions,” he says. “When there’s a lot of demand the stress levels tend to be lower and all the benefits of the position tend to be greater because the employer has to make an effort to keep the people on staff.” Lee says he sees the job market picking up. “You’re starting to see some pretty significant shortages that cannot be filled.”
