Who cares?
That’s what I say when I read a list of the “10 hottest careers” or the “10 hottest jobs today” or something like that. What’s hot today isn’t necessarily hot tomorrow.
These lists of the top “10 hottest this” and the “top 5 hottest that” are often just one person’s opinion of what is hot at the time they wrote the article. Besides, if I read an article that tells me that one of the hottest jobs is investment banking, does that mean that the average person reading the article is going to run out and start applying for and getting investment banking jobs?
Of course not.
It’s only applicable to someone who is either already doing the job or something similar, a student who is about to graduate in a financial services or business program and who might be interested in such a job, or someone who is about to make a career change and qualifies for such a position. In other words, it’s irrelevant to most of us.
When I started in IT recruitment in 2000, companies had just finished several years of mass hiring for anyone who could help them with their Y2K projects. By the time 2000 hit and Y2K had passed without much fanfare – probably a combination of the fact that much of it was over hyped and companies did take precautions ahead of time – many of them had no IT budget left and many of the highly-paid IT consultants who had worked on these Y2K projects were now unemployed or underemployed in new, lower paying jobs.
An industry like IT is always changing and many other industries are the same way. New technologies and platforms are coming out all the time so learning is constant and what was used yesterday (AS 400, Netscape, C programming language, Windows 3.1, Novell, etc) is rarely used if at all these days.
The point is that what’s hot today isn’t necessarily hot for the long term. Besides, even if it’s hot it might not be something you’d either be good at or are even qualified to do.
When I see these general lists that mention the 10 hottest careers, the lists are usually a hodge podge of completely unrelated jobs and an average reader might – if they’re lucky – find one that they qualify for or are even interested in.
So what’s the point?
Other than entertainment, not much.
If you’re a healthcare professional and you see a list of the 10 hottest healthcare jobs, well that’s a bit different because first off, the list is at least targeted to your industry. Plus since it’s targeted to your background, it’s possible that at least some of the jobs are ones that someone in the business could transition to down the line with a little bit more experience.
Take these top 10-type lists with a grain of salt. Sometimes they’re useful sometimes they’re not.
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