With a strengthening economy and an unemployment rate hovering around 4.3 percent—down from 5.3 percent just two years ago—the U.S. job market is looking bright for workers.
While certain industries like textiles, manufacturing, and publishing continue to struggle, other sectors are seeing rapid growth—and robust salaries. Not surprisingly, most high-paying jobs are in fields such as technology, medicine, and finance and typically require advanced degrees and specialized training. However, some occupations, like a data architect or plant manager, only require a bachelor’s degree.
Bottom line: If you’re college bound and considering career options, there’s plenty of opportunities out there to make some serious bank.
But it also takes dedication, a strong work ethic and, in some cases, wince-inducing student loans to compete in today’s innovative, rapidly changing job market.
For skilled workers who have already launched their careers, you’re in a strong position to leverage your skills to ask for a raise or find a more lucrative position. In fact, Glassdoor indicates that in today’s market, when people leave a job for a pay raise, the new position can pay as much as 20 percent more. And of course, it’s always helpful to sharpen your IT skills via classes or online services like Lynda.com, which will make you more marketable for almost any job. As you’re mulling your career path—or perhaps eyeballing that corner office—check out this list of the 25 highest-paying jobs for 2017, which is based on a recent Glassdoor report. The organization only included jobs that received at least 100 salary reports shared by U.S.-based employees over the past year (2/1/16 – 1/31/17). To ensure the most reliable median base salary for all job titles, Glassdoor applied a proprietary statistical algorithm to estimate annual median base pay, which controls for factors such as location and seniority.