Top 20 paying occupations

These are the top 20 paying occupations across the world, USA and UK.

Introduction

In a previous post, I mentioned the importance of being better informed in developing a passion.

This week’s post aims to do this in one aspect: to help readers become better informed about youth’s career prospects.

Declining youth graduates employment

The 2020 Oct issue of NBER Digest has an article about young graduates employment. Essentially, the findings are:

1. Young college graduates (aged 22-30) have a lower employment rate relative to older graduates (aged 31-40), post the 2009 Global Financial Crisis;
2. Low employment rates for young college graduates started around 2005, well before the GFC; and
3. Such lower rates of unemployment have lingering scarring effects, in the form of weaker income growth and higher rates of unemployment for the rest of their careers.

In the words of Jesse Rothstein, the author:

Something appears to have changed in the labor market, creating negative effects on new generations’ employment rates. …Those who face high unemployment rates at the start of their careers have lower wages through their first several years in the labor market, but these scars gradually fade. Scarring effects on employment, in contrast, are permanent. Cohorts that face high unemployment when they enter the labor market have lower employment rates throughout their careers.

Jesse Rothstein, 2020: The Lost Generation? Labor Market Outcomes for Post Great Recession Entrants

Did they all become YouTubers?

“Have they all become Youtubers?” was my first thought. In response to the question, I gathered the following statistics:

1. there are about 45 million people in the age group 20-29, according to Statista;
2. the proportion of these people with some college education is just over 60%, according to the paper. This gives the relevant “college education young”‘ at 27m;
3. To bridge the 3% employment rate gap means we would need 800,000 people in the content creation industry;
4. Competition amongst YouTubers is intense: there are more than 31 million YouTube channels with more than 10 subscribers in 2019,
5. Nearly 50% of the channels with 10 million+ subscribers are in the USA;
6. According to Mathias Bärtl, a professor at Offenburg University of Applied Sciences in Offenburg, the “top 3 per cent of most-viewed channels could bring in advertising revenue of about $16,800 a year.” This means about 900,000 channels make $16,800 a year. If the USA accounts for a similar 50% of these as for the 10 million+ channels above, we would have 450,000 US YouTubers making some form of living.

To show that content creators account for the 2-3% employment rate gap, these 450,000 will need to fall into the 20-30 age group. This looks a stretch.

The top-earning occupations

The Bloomberg article above has the following advice for parents whose children dream of YouTube stardom: Crush that ambition now.

Given the above, what are the options? I looked into the top 20 paying occupation across the World, USA and UK. Here’s what I found.

Top paying occupations in the world

According to Wealthy Gorilla, the Top 20 paying occupations in the world are:

Rank / Profession	Average Salary
1. Neurosurgeon	$          381,500
2. Anesthesiologist	$          265,000
3. Surgeon	$          251,000
4. Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeon	$          243,500
5. Gynaecologist	$          235,240
6. Orthodontist	$          228,500
7. Psychiatrist	$          216,090
8. General Practioner (GP)	$          208,560
9. CEO	$          200,140
10. Internist	$          198,370
11. Prosthodontist	$          196,960
12. Paediatrician	$          183,240
13. Dentist	$          174,110
14. Nurse Anaesthesiologist	$          169,450
15. Airline Pilot & Co-Pilot	$          161,280
16. IT Manager	$          142,530
17. Petroleum Engineer	$          154,780
18. Podiatrist	$          148,470
19. Marketing Manager	$          145,620
20. Lawyer	$          141,890

Top paying occupations in the USA

The list for USA, according to BusinessInsider, is as follows:

Rank	Profession	Average Salary	No. Employed
1	Anesthesiologists	$261,730	31,010
2	Surgeons	$252,040	36,270
3	Oral and maxillofacial surgeons	$237,570	4,650
4	Obstetricians and gynecologists	$233,610	18,620
5	Orthodontists	$230,830	5,990
6	Prosthodontists	$220,840	490
7	Psychiatrists	$220,430	25,530
8	Family medicine physicians	$213,270	109,370
9	All other physicians and ophthalmologists, except pediatric	$203,450	390,680
10	General internists	$201,440	44,610
11	Chief executives	$193,850	205,890
12	General pediatricians	$184,410	29,740
13	Nurse anesthetists	$181,040	43,570
14	General dentists	$178,260	110,730
15	All other dentist specialists	$178,040	5,330
16	Airline pilots, co-pilots, and flight engineers	$174,870	84,520
17	Petroleum engineers	$156,780	32,620
18	Computer and information systems managers	$156,390	433,960
19	Architectural and engineering managers	$152,930	194,250
20	Marketing managers	$149,200	263,680

Top paying occupations in the UK

Fincyte has a Top 20 paying occupations list for the UK, distinguished by those that need a degree and those that don’t:

Rank	Profession	Average Salary	Need Degree?
1	Finance Manager	£68K	Yes
2	Mobile Developer	£68K	Yes
3	Technical Architect	£66K	Yes
4	Solution Architect	£65K	Yes
5	Commercial Manager	£65K	Yes
6	Risk Manager	£60K	Yes
7	Audit Manager	£59.5K	Yes
8	Tax Manager	£59.2K	Yes
9	Design Manager	£55K	Yes
10	Scrum Master	£55K	Yes
11	Ethical Hackers	£35K	No
12	Mining Construction	£25K	No
13	Fire Fighter	£21.5K	No
14	Prison Officer	£18.2K	No
15	Customer Services	£18K	No
16	House Managers	£12.5K	No
17	Journalists	£12K	No
18	Salas Executives	£12K	No
19	Offshore Oil Worker	£4.2K	No
20	Chicken Sexer	£3.4K	No

Commonality and curiosity

The list for the world and the USA show a commonality; the preponderance of the medical profession in the top 20 list. This seems to me to echo a point made by Cal Newport about career capital. These are “rare and valuable” skills that people will pay for. The value of medical training is obvious in the above table.

It’s questionable if pilots and petroleum engineers would still be tenable careers post-pandemic, though.

The UK list looks strange to me. The medical profession is inexplicably missing from the list. The NHS monopoly might explain why UK doctors are poorer paid relative to those in the USA. However, within the UK, we should still expect doctors to be well-paid relative to other professions.

What about traders, financiers and tech?

Curiously missing from the top 20 occupations lists are finance and technology occupations.

In the same 2020 Oct issue of the NBER Digest mentioned above, there is an article about hedge funds fees. According to Itzhak Ben-David, Justin Birru, and Andrea Rossi,

Inclusive of management fees, fund managers collected 64 cents of every dollar earned, net of riskless returns, on invested capital, while investors took home 36 cents….Over the 22 years studied, the capital invested in the hedge funds in the sample earned gross profits of $228 billion. Hedge fund managers collected incentive fees of $133 billion.

Ben-David et al, 2020: The Performance of Hedge Fund Performance Fees

In a previous post, I mentioned similar findings by an Oxford don about the private equity industry:

for PE funds that raised capital from 2006 – 2015, the total commitment raised was US$1.7 trillion, the total paid-in capital was US$1.2 trillion, and the total value net of fees was US$2.1 trillion. This gives a net profit of US$922 billion after fees. …, assuming a carried interest of 20% per industry standard, the carry would be US$230 billion.

Ludovic Phalippou, 2020: An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & The Billionaire Factory

Granted, the bulk of the above fees would be hoovered up by the top brass of the respective industries. That said, even the crumbs doled out to the underlings would still be plenty.

If your objective is to make a certain level of income to ensure a certain level of lifestyle, finance-type occupations should be on your list. If you want to do good to society, you might want to look elsewhere.

In 2019 September, BusinessInsiders ran an article about The 20 highest-paying companies in Silicon Valley in 2019. The median pay for these ran from $135K to $170K. Tech roles are also desirable for the portability of tech-skills and relative abundance of opportunities to hit the jackpot.

Conclusion

To conclude, the employment market for young people has changed significantly since 2005. Even then, we can expect more such changes post-pandemic.

Despite the changes, “rare and valuable” skills, such as medicine, would still command a premium. This is evident in the lists of top 20 paying occupations. With ongoing changes to the structure of the economy, the types of skills in demand will inevitably change. The value of the top 20 lists is that it informs readers how much the market is ready to pay for the skills it value.

At its current stage of development, Youtubers as an occupation only reward stars. That a top 3% YouTuber makes barely $16,000 a year shows that the market does not view the skills as “rare and valuable”.