Need a Job? 10 Prestigious Careers for YOU!

Nearly all of the most prestigious careers in 2014 require job seekers to have a post-secondary college degree, according to a new poll by Harris Interactive.

Doctors, military officers and firefighters top the list, as the three most prestigious professions in the United States, at 88%, 78% and 76%, respectively, of people finding these careers highest in the prestige league.

Rounding out the list of highest prestigious careers are: #4 Scientist (76%), #5 Nurse (70%), #6 Engineer (69%), #7 Police Officer (66%), #8 Priest/Minister/Clergy (62%), #9 Architect (62%), and #10 Teacher (60%).

Military officers are particularly held in the highest regard across the United States, alongside firefighters, especially in the post 9-11 era, where Americans saw firsthand how hard these heroes work, while putting their lives on the line to save lives. And, parents seem quite proud in encouraging their kids to pursue these often dangerous careers of ensuring our safety and security, both across our homeland and abroad for our nation.

Looking "Up The Ladder" as a Firefighter.

My late father, Oliver G. McGee, Jr., was the first black firefighter in the nearly century and a quarter history of the Cincinnati Fire Department (1961-1970).

"He's just one of the gang, just one of the crew," observed then-Lieutenant John Klingler of the former old Engine Co. 32, housed near Rockdale Ave and Reading Road in the historic neighborhood of North Avondale in Cincinnati, as Klingler made his comments to The Cincinnati Enquirer's staff writer Margaret Josten back in 1967.

My father became a firefighter, because he felt he had gone as far as he could go, as a labor man in the supply division at the then-Cincinnati Waterworks.

"I got just as far as I could go," he said to Josten.

One day back in 1961 he saw a Cincinnati fire recruiting poster on the Cincinnati Waterworks bulletin board, and decided to make a try for a new career by taking the fire department's required entrance examination in which he placed at the top of the list of applicants seeking work with the Cincinnati Fire Department for 1961.

Back then, open house ceremonies to recruit Blacks for the Cincinnati Fire Department were formally staged at the then-Fire College on Linn and Liberty Streets in Cincinnati. Then-Cincinnati Human Relations Commission, then-Civil Service Commission, and the Fire Department sponsored such events.

Speaking to Josten, he said - and Klingler agreed - that it is impossible to find a much better job without a college degree.

"You can go all the way to chief," my father noted, "and $18,000 isn't what I'd call a bad salary."

Back in 1967, he was right, it was immediate career jump at a middle-class salary level for my dad and our family. Today, that firefighter's salary approaches almost ten times that $18,000 annual pay amount, and remarkably, holds the #3 spot on our America's most prestigious professions list.

Fire Engine Co. 32 was a large brick firehouse, built in 1898, housing the engine and ladder units, dating Cincinnati as having one of the world's oldest firefighting units, alongside the Boston, New York and London fire brigades.

In 1967, units working out of the old Fire Engine Co. 32 totaled more of what is known as "water discharge time" (meaning they poured more water onto actual fires) than many other fire brigade units in Cincinnati at that time. Actual emergency runs from Engine Co. 32 ranked fourth highest in Cincinnati back then.

"One day is easy; one day is hard," my father told Josten in a matter-of-fact tone.

He recalled two fires that scared him some - one on Neilson Place in Evanston, Cincinnati, his first day with Engine Co. 32; the other at a roaring Warwick Apartments fire on Reading Road, when he thought two other firefighters were trapped inside.

My dad told me once that it is impossible for fire brigades to put out a roaring fire inside a building taller than eight stories.

So, this prestigious profession is an especially dangerous one, when facing a fire inside a high-rise building, like the former World Trade Center on 9-11. Those firefighters were men and women of extreme courage and valor, climbing up that huge chimney, risking their own lives to save lives.

My father saw the firefighting job as one that offers plenty of chance for advancement to the high school graduate, which he received his diploma from Cincinnati's Woodward High School, the oldest public high school west of the Appalachian Mountains. Woodward High was founded in 1824 by nineteenth century public education philanthropist, William Woodward, and the same high school from which I am an alumnus.

My studious dad also noted to Cincinnati Enquirer's Josten that "a man can go all the way "up the ladder," if he is willing to work hard and to study at the subjects with which a firefighter must be acquainted."

He added to Josten: "he has no argument with the firefighter's salary or pension plan."

Soon after joining the Cincinnati Fire Department, my father also worked on the side, "moonlighting," sort-of-speaking, running a small business in home remodeling and engineering construction, because typically a firefighter works every third day for 24 hours, then off for 48 hours of much needed rest.

Paying Forward "Moonlighting" Inspire Some to Land a Job in Engineering.

When I was growing up, my father would drag me out of bed to report at 6:30 am to home remodeling construction sites with him in North Avondale and all across neighborhoods of the seven hills of Cincinnati.

He would teach me the technical mechanics and mathematics of scaled engineering construction drawings.

My dad taught me how to use a slide rule to make technical calculations, and how to employ a construction leveler to ensured we were building a straight and level structure properly.

My father also taught me the hard work ethics of engineering and the integrity of quality execution of building construction. This oftentimes called for me, as a skinny yet growing boy, to lift and carrying extremely heavy construction materials needed to build a huge patio or decorative rock wall for our neighbor's home remodeling needs.

But most of all, I learned very early-on in life, the feeling of deep satisfaction of performing a job well-done with my father, upon returning home filthy dirty at the end of a long day of hard work at 6:30 pm for dinner.

This is how a firefighter pays forward "moonlighting" to inspire a boy to land a job in engineering.

Today, I am several engineers - a civil, an aerospace, and a mechanical engineer.

What about engineering, the prestigious career most parents want their children to pursue?

It comes sixth in the prestigious top 10 careers at 69 percent of people finding an engineering career in high regard, ahead of police officers, priests, architects and teachers.

An emerging moderate Washington will have to induce a multiplier effect of a multi-year investment in rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure to stimulate job creation in the private sector. It will require a national "call-to-action" to finally retrofit, repair, redevelop, and even re-create America’s crumbling infrastructure.

This is where "mega-scale" engineering and operations intersects with sound national policy maintained over several decades.

I wholeheartedly agree with such innovative proposals by Bernard L. Schwartz, CEO of BLS Investments, who says a trillion dollar multi-year investment in rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure will replace six million of the eight million jobs lost during the recent U.S. financial meltdown of 2007-2008.

This will ensure a return back home of much of the two trillion dollars shifted off-shore to more affordable labor markets for corporations, and much of another two trillion dollars invested abroad for double-digit real returns from emerging markets for banks.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner, MH370/MH17 Tragedies, and Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Challenges Raise Public Need for Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), meanwhile, tracks the projected growth rate for most areas of engineering, although it does not always tell the complete story.

Aerospace engineering, for example, is growing at a rate of just 5% (slower than average, according to the BLS), but new opportunities may arise. Aerospace engineering was viewed as a downturn profession, because the field was considered mature.

Very few questions remained until Boeing's 787 Dreamliner opened up a new window of aerospace engineering applications of information technology (combined with alternative forms of energy and supplemental power utilization).

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, as the World's new low-orbital space shuttle, also brought renewed jobs and career opportunities for aerospace and mechanical engineers.

Such engineers are now looking at how to manage the new lithium-ion auxiliary power technological leap in long-range commercial aircraft that has taken place, because of Boeing’s virtual manufacturing and global innovation enterprise.

The vanishing and shooting down of two engineering marvels, as a Boeing 777-200, so enormous like these ones, operated as Malaysia Airlines flights MH370 and MH17, naturally compels aviation job seekers to just stay with these stories until these historical aviation safety and security mysterious incidents are resolved.

Such information technological leaps as cloud streaming, 'big data', advanced wireless-mobile, and social media will have direct impacts on the digital-age of international airline business operations, cockpit aviation, navigation, and communications, air traffic control management, and international aviation safety and security.

New aerospace engineering and aviation safety mishap investigation jobs will emerge from technological leaps clearly in-line with what has been envisioned on LinkedIn ‘influence-media’ inside, ‘Black-Box’ in ‘The Cloud’ means no MH370 and Air France flight 447 again, and Malaysia 370 Lesson Learned: It’s Time to Secure ‘The Black-Box’ in ‘The Cloud', and elsewhere on broadcast media.

"Humanity’s greatest achievements come out of our greatest pain," Virgin Galactic chief Sir Richard Branson said.

"We're going to learn from what went wrong," the Virgin Group founder said Saturday November 1, as he fully committed his commercial space tourism innovation subsidiary, Virgin Galactic, as a learning enterprise in addressing its mistakes and continuing in the company's quest to send paying passengers into space.

“We owe it to our test pilots to find out what went wrong,” Branson said. “And once we find out what went wrong, if we can overcome it, we will make absolutely certain that the dream lives on.”

“In testing the boundaries of human capabilities and technologies, we are standing on the shoulders of giants,” Branson said. “Yesterday (October 31), we fell short. We will now comprehensively assess the results of the crash and are determined to learn from this and move forward together.”

There are huge risks in commercial suborbital space travel, Branson conveyed to the international media on November 1. However, he repeatedly acknowledged that "yesterday (October 31), we fell short," as he steadfastly vowed to continue testing Virgin Galactic's capabilities, so similar accidents would not occur, most of all, while passengers are on board.

Such aerospace and mechanical engineering safety risks to human life would not be tolerable.

Although the October 31 SpaceShipTwo spacecraft crash was a setback, my companion post, "Virgin Galactic: Keep Pushing US Into New Space," featured on LinkedIn Pulse Big Ideas & Innovation Channel, and Space Channel, enthusiastically supports Branson's space travel quest continuing, as a science, technology and industry pioneer.

This would be substantially beneficial to the government-university-industry partnership in achieving the breakthrough advancements of "New Space" transportation research and development and eventual job creation, not only in the U.S., but also around the world.

Environmental Engineering Job Opportunities Continue to Emerge.

Environmental engineering jobs are another professional vocation to watch. In some economically-stressed and under-served neighborhoods, there is a question of how do we look at sustainability and environmental impact.

So, we see a tremendous growth in environmental engineering grand-challenge concerns these days. Particularly, we see how such concerns impact poverty, education, health, and climate.

Environmental engineering fields are attracting its fair share of women and minorities, who are interested in building sustainable societies and livable urban and rural communities.

When I headed the civil and environmental engineering department at Ohio State University, we had a large cohort of women environmental engineers and also a healthy supply of African-American and Latino students interested in environmental engineering. These students are particularly interested in building sustainable societies inside neighborhoods, cites, and communities around the world.

Job Growth Continues in Combined Engineering, Information and Biological Sciences.

Current events in recent years of natural disasters, like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina and Oklahoma tornado events, for example, provide a harbinger of job opportunities for civil engineers collaborating with information technologists.

These highly-skilled professionals will be required to simultaneously reinvent, retrofit, and rebuild both our physical and virtual infrastructures, especially so for influence media and social media-based crisis communications, family-care and mediation, natural and man-made disaster mitigation, investigations and recovery, and media relations management.

Twenty-first century national security threats, including 9-11, the bombing at the Boston marathon, NSA surveillance, treason and espionage concerns, ISIS challenges, and Ebola health crisis management, raise new job opportunities in counter-terrorism, cyber-security, bio-informatics, and human genomic sciences, bringing together bio-medical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers (growing at a rate of 62%, 6%, and 9% respectively, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). These engineers will be called upon to work alongside information technologists, bio-technologist, and human genetic experts.

This emerging workforce need is especially exciting in the areas of "quantitative biology" – which is essentially performing computational biological test-tube experiments using high-performance computers and advanced mathematical biological and human genetics computational software.

How Can Students Be Ready for Prestigious Computers Engineering Science and Information Technology Careers?

Additional job opportunities in computers engineering science and information technology arise out of emerging online Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) education, nowadays and ongoing into the future.

The main challenges of job growth inside the industry of online MOOCs providers are: (1) substituting venture capital for good labor (good teaching, research, and public service), and (2) having excellent 'online MOOCs education' pilot programs in which to establish a strong hard research base in which to draw best practices from, including inventing new MOOCs jobs and enhancing MOOCs workforce development.

The Economist says,

Besides the uncertainty over which business model, if any, will produce profits, there is disagreement over how big the market will be. Some see a zero- or negative-sum game, in which cheap online providers radically reduce the cost of higher education and drive many traditional institutions to the wall. Others believe this effect will be dwarfed by the dramatic increase in access to higher education that the MOOCs will bring."

Skills Gap Ahead in the U.S. Workforce.

Latest real unemployment data reveals 95 million Americans remain out of work. A large supply of jobs available for these folks are either temporary or part-time work. Nonetheless, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014 data suggests that there are 2.9 million job openings out there right now. However, only less than half of these openings are being filled.

Rapidly emerging in the next couple years, we will see highly-skilled professionals requiring higher pay in the prestige league, like doctors, lawyers, business entrepreneurs, research scientists, oil industry engineers, and software industry engineers.

And, in widespread contrast to these higher paying jobs, we will see lower-skilled workers requiring lower pay, like home nursing aides, fast-food service providers, and store clerks.

The huge challenge is for those falling in between these vocational paths, as their outlook is bleaker with fewer moderately paid industrial unit supervisors, postal workers, and staff administrators.

Remarkably, there have been urgent calls among some U.S. workforce development experts for the nation to produce a million scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians in the next ten years in order for the U.S. to just remain globally competitive in the future.

Meanwhile, after the recent election on November 4, a moderate Washington will have to finally address the education crisis across Main Street America in the training of scientist, engineers, mathematicians, and technologists.

This skills training is particularly essential within groups historically under-represented among this workforce going into the future in a new age of demography shift and heightened engagement across America's society about its social, technological, education, economic and political challenges in the next 5-10 years.

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Oliver McGee is professor of mechanical engineering at Howard University. He is an aerospace, mechanical, and civil engineer, and author of six books on Amazon. He is former United States deputy assistant secretary of transportation for technology policy (1999-2001) in the Clinton Administration, and former senior policy adviser in the Clinton White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1997-1999).

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