his part contains a lot of interesting lists, and its a good place for you to start using the

book. Here are some

suggestions for using the lists to explore career options:
The Table of Contents at the beginning of this book presents a complete listing of the list titles in this
section. You can browse the lists or use the Table of Contents to find those that interest you most.
We gave the lists clear titles, so most require little explanation. We provide comments for each group
of lists.
As you review the lists, one or more of the jobs may appeal to you enough that you want to seek
additional information. As this happens, mark that job (or, if someone else will be using this book, write it
on a separate sheet of paper) so that you can look up the description of the job in Part IV.
Keep in mind that all jobs in these lists meet our basic criteria for being included in this book. All
lists, therefore, are organized by personality type and emphasize occupations with high pay, high growth, or
large numbers of openings. These economic measures are easily quantified and are often presented in lists of
best jobs in the newspapers and other media. While earnings, growth, and openings are important, there are
other factors to consider in your career planning. For example, location, having an opportunity to serve
others, and enjoying your work are a few of many factors that may define the ideal job for you. These
measures are difficult or impossible to quantify and thus are not used
in this book, so you will need to consider the importance of these issues yourself. The resources listed in
Appendix D may help you research these issues.
All data used to create these lists comes from the U.S. Department of Labor. The earnings figures are
based on the average annual pay received by full-time workers. Because the earnings represent the national
averages, actual pay rates can vary greatly by location, amount of previous work experience, and other
factors.
3334
50BestJobsforYourPersonality JISTWorks
Part III
_______________________________________________________________________________
_
Best Jobs Overall for Each Personality Type:
Jobs with the Highest Pay, Fastest
Growth, and Most Openings
The four sets of lists that follow are the most important lists in this book. The first set of lists presents, for
each personality type, the jobs with the highest combined scores for pay, growth, and number of openings.
These are very appealing lists because they represent jobs with the very highest quantifiable measures from
our labor market. The 283 jobs in these six lists are the ones that are described in detail in Part IV.
The three additional sets of lists present, for each personality type, jobs with the highest scores in each of
three measures: annual earnings, projected percentage growth, and largest number of openings.
The 50 Best Jobs for Each Personality Type
These are the lists that most people want to see first. For each personality type, you can see the jobs that have
the highest overall combined ratings for earnings, projected growth, and number of openings. (The How
the Jobs in This Book Were Selected section in the Introduction explains in detail how we rated jobs to
assemble this list.)
Although each list covers one personality type, youll notice a wide variety of jobs on the list. For example,
among the top 20 Investigative jobs are some in the fields of high technology, medicine, education, and
business. Among the top 20 Conventional jobs are some in the financial, legal, technology, and health-care
industries. We included each jobs personality code, which indicates its primary and secondary (if any)
personality types.
A look at one list will clarify how we ordered the jobstake the Realistic list as an example. Civil Engineers
is on the top of the list because it was the occupation with the best total score. The second-place job,
Surveyors, has somewhat better projected job growth, but it has fewer projected job openings and
considerably lower earnings, so its total score was lower than that for Civil Engineers. The other occupations
follow in descending order based on their total scores. Many jobs had tied scores and were simply listed one
after another, so there are often only very small or even no differences between the scores of jobs that are
near each other on the list. All other job lists in this book use these lists as their source. You can find
descriptions for each of these jobs in Part IV, beginning on page 129.