What is a good job to have?

[Jerzy Bondov]

I used to work in a directory enquiries call centre. It got closed down and everybody there was made redundant. This is because the business of directory enquiries was being transformed by the internet, smartphones, cheap overseas call centres, its own overweening hunger for lucre, and a public growing tired of funny men with moustaches doing various things. When I was hired, they were recruiting at least ten people every week. One year later, recruitment was frozen and the training and recruiting teams were all laid off. A year after that, the whole place was shuttered. I was given two weeks' pay, a car sticker, and a vest. That's an example of getting into a job market at a bad time.

After that I went and did what I wanted to do in the first place, which was (and is) library work. Nobody thought it was a good idea at the time, and see if you can find a librarian who recommends coming into the profession now. Find a library that doesn't have over-worked and harried staff who are expecting to lose their jobs at any minute.

Personally I intend to go down with this book-laden ship until it grazes the bottom of the ocean and scary fish with lightbulb heads come and eat my crushed body. But if I wanted to get on a lifeboat instead, where would I go?

Now is not a good time to be a banker. Nor is it a good time to be a journalist. Now is not a good time to be a teacher. Or an artist. Or a musician. Or a shopkeeper, or a writer, or a pub landlord, or a politician, or an oil baron, or a royal marine, or a webmaster, or a bear.

Here is my question: can anybody think of a job where, if you were to go in and talk to somebody there, they would tell you 'Yes. This is a good job to have. Its long-term prospects are good. I enjoy my work, feel like I am valued, and do not worry about losing my job. This is a good job to have.'?

[mook]

undertaker.

[QDRPHNC]

Cobbler, carpenter, butcher, farmer, hunter, innkeeper, blacksmith. Assuming you're looking for something with a future.

[Nuclear Optimism]

Any job apart from mine. Hope that narrows it down.

[mook]

if i were to start over. i'd go for artisan baker. specialise in long fermentation sourdough breads and you can knock those loafy buggers out for best part of 4 quid a pop from a wood fired oven. i imagine start up costs to be ~£30000. you should make about £3 from each loaf, all you need is a load of hipster foodie fucks to buy them.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

Now is not a good time to be a banker.

Are you kidding me?

[Jerzy Bondov]

Are you kidding me?

I mean a banker would probably not recommend that you get into banking now. He'd say 'oh mate it's not what it once was. You can't just rock up and take all the money for doing nothing and just roll around on the ground laughing any more without being ineffectually pilloried in the the left-wing press. What a state.'

I think I'd like to work in a warehouse exchanging salty banter with other men and hurtling around on a forklift, but it's probably not what it once was due to Elf (the hit film starring Will Ferrell) and safety.

[doppelkorn]

It's not been a good time to be a farmer for about 20 years has it? Or maybe 200 years? They all have to open up their barns to be conference centres these days for the sake of getting EU diversification grants.

[doppelkorn]

It's probably still a good time to learn to do computer coding and become a "dev". They seem to get paid SHITLOADS.

[The Masked Unit]

One word for you mate: Gangster rapper.

[rudi]

Super Varmint

[madhair60]

Giant Robot Pilot

[madhair60]

also Pokémon Trainer

[Beagle 2]

Writer specialising in vampires and kinky sex.

[Jemble Fred]

Some of the rejected jobs in the OP are fine. There's never a bad time to become a teacher, for a start. Or rather, there's probably never an especially good time, but in the reliable source of income stakes, it's fourteen thousand billion times better than anything else mentioned on this thread. Teaching at a Junior level especially could be a good move for you, but it is also a very very hard job, and extremely painful training, so I am informed.

[Zetetic]

Elderly care, if you don't mind dealing with violence. That looks like a growing market to me, but I don't know if it feels like for people actually working there.

[phes]

one of those guys like in Happy Gilmore that gets hired to go to sporting events and put off the contractor's opponents by yelling humourous/insulting catchphrases at opportune moments. 

[Jerzy Bondov]

Some of the rejected jobs in the OP are fine. There's never a bad time to become a teacher, for a start. Or rather, there's probably never an especially good time, but in the reliable source of income stakes, it's fourteen thousand billion times better than anything else mentioned on this thread. Teaching at a Junior level especially could be a good move for you, but it is also a very very hard job, and extremely painful training, so I am informed.

Nope not doing that, my fiancee is a teacher and it looks like a right old ballache. Mind you she's an English teacher at a comprehensive school. I bet it's a good time to be a PE teacher. Just standing around shouting GET UP THERE at children and then you get to watch them have a shower! Fantastic.

[Jemble Fred]

Ah right, I see. Just for clarity's sake then, can you go back to your first post and edit in the words "for me" about twelve times then? Cheeeers!

[mook]

i'd have thought being a teacher would be a hellish job. the pay is average to poor at best considering you're surrounded by kids and fucking teachers all day. no wonder they all look so bloody miserable. christ, it must get old real quick having to teach the same old shite day in day out without anything to look forward to bar a poxy pension. surely any progress in their careers only leads them further away from what they originally wanted to do. sounds dreadful to me.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Point taken Jemble but what I was trying to get at is the way nobody will ever recommend their own job to anybody else. I can't remember if you are a teacher, but none of the teachers I know have ever told me I should join the club.

Also a lot of teachers I know have been under threat of redundancy and feel extremely poor treated by the current government, Ofsted, and their own schools = bad time to be a teacher. Worse time to be a librarian though.

Maybe it's a good time to be an Ofsted inspector. Sitting around watching people try to do a really hard job and then going 'nah not good enough mate'. This is basically all we do on the internet.

[Jemble Fred]

Well I was only joshing in my last post, but the point is that teaching will always be there as long as our society lasts, unlike libraries and newsprint journalism. As a profession it has its ups and downs, but is more akin to medicine as an eternally required skill.

[Jerzy Bondov]

One day all teaching will be done by The Cloud. Not in our lifetimes though. If you can put up with it then teaching is probably a good idea.

My actual real non-joshing opinion is that it is very rarely ever a good time time to do anything, and when it is you can only tell in hindsight, so just do what seems like it'll make you happy. Whether that's teaching or stomping dogs in a bath then just get on with it.

Definitely a very good time to be stomping dogs in a bath.

[rudi]

Point taken Jemble but what I was trying to get at is the way nobody will ever recommend their own job to anybody else.

My job's great; it's a shame Gideon has decided to close the dept down, but then that's because he's a cunt.

[mook]

One day all teaching will be done by The Cloud. Not in our lifetimes though. If you can put up with it then teaching is probably a good idea.

i'm going to ignore the dog stomping.

but this:

http://www.khanacademy.org/

looks interesting. i wonder if he's got a bit on long division? i swear i must have been sick they week they taught us that. either or i've just blanked it out. on the very rare occasions i have to do long division by hand i have to do a simple one first as a warm up! i am a tool though.

[rudi]

Are you a tall man, mook?

[Jemble Fred]

I'll tell you what, as someone who's spent most of this year combing through job vacancies, it seems there's never been a bad time to be a 'WHATEVER THE FUCK THAT IS, CUNT!' By which I mean, a 'Marketing Controller', 'Junior Account Manager', 'Digital Key Account Executive', and a thousand other fucking rearrangements of those words and ones equally boring. Fuck knows what you have to do to qualify for these mind-numbing non-occupations, or what the fuck good you do for society, and whether anyone would ever miss all the 'Marketing Controller's if they died out. I'm guessing you'd have to have no genitals and hardly any brain, and certainly no heart, for a start. Presumably they're all to do with money – making it, making more, sticking it up urethras, whatever these cunts do with money. But anyway, every job site you visit will have dozens and dozens of equally meaningless job titles going, most of them offering £30k+, and none of them benefiting mankind. Who needs libraries when we can have our losses adjusted by loss adjustors, and markets executed by marketing executives?

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

Come and be a mental health nurse!  3 years training working full time half the year and earning nothing for it, an absolute end to your social life, emotional exhaustion and then a shitly paid, no progression job at the end of it!

(I'm very happy with my decision to become a psychotherapist when I'm finished training.  Which will take another few years and a ton of money)

[Jerzy Bondov]

If you're ever at a party/wake/pagan sacrifice ritual and you ask somebody what they do and they say 'Digital Key Account Executive' it is actually legal to get them in a bath and stomp on them until they are dead.

[Jemble Fred]

What I'm guessing it is, is that somebody sets up a bank account in the name of a picture of a key which has been drawn in Photoshop. It is then your job to execute... things to do with it. As in, withdrawals and payments in and so on. So you're going to the bank for a digital picture of a key.