There are some jobs that everyone wants, and some jobs that nobody wants.  If your job fits into either of those camps, then you’re probably sick of hearing people’s jealousy (or sympathy), and will spend a lot of time wishing that people understood your career a little better.  The sad thing is, even people that have a misunderstood occupation often make the same mistake when it comes to other people’s jobs. Take a look at the following list of careers that many people don’t understand.  You may find it enlightening.

Romanticized Career Paths

1. Anything involving remote working: As soon as people hear that a job involves a lot of remote working, they immediately assume that you get to laze around at home all day, and that what you’re doing isn’t really work. Sadly, that’s far from the truth.  Working from home is still work, and it often involves long hours, unpredictable work loads, and being on call at stupid times of the night.

2. Professional athletes: “You get to travel the world, and play your favourite sport all day?  That’s awesome!”  Well, it might be, but it takes a lot of dedication to get to that stage.  Do you really want to get up at 4AM and go for a long run?  Do you have the discipline to say no thanks to the chocolate cake because you have a weigh-in next week and you’re trying to manage your calorie intake?  What about training when you’re injured or just feeling a little down?  Professional sport is still work, and it’s one of the toughest jobs there is.

3. Authors: When an author is staring out of a window, they’re not daydreaming or procrastinating. They’re thinking.  Authors face a lot of pressure.  They’re only as good as their last book, and, if a deadline is looming and they simply can’t find the words, their career could be doomed. If all you’ve ever written is a lengthy email, then don’t give an author the “I’d love to write a novel someday” speech.  They’ve heard it all before.

Unloved Career Paths

1. Contact centre services: The people that work in tech support, billing, and other contact centre services don’t get a lot of respect, but it doesn’t mean that their job is not a fulfilling one. You get to speak to some great people when you work in a contact centre, and the joy of helping people should not be underestimated.

2. Law Enforcement: Another group that gets a lot of hassle is law enforcement workers, but once again this can be a great job.  For every yob that yells abuse at you, there are just as many people that are genuinely grateful for your help, and many law enforcement officers love knowing that each day they work, they’ve done their bit to make the world a better place.

3. Public relations: Some people think that being a PR must be awesome – a life of parties and excitement.  Other people think that being a PR would be a nightmare – promoting poor products, and having to be polite to people that you hate, but that could ruin your career by writing bad things about the products you’re responsible for.  The truth is somewhere in between.  It’s hard work, but at the end of the day you can point to a front page spread and say “I helped make that happen”.

Guest post written by Amy Fowler on behalf of Maintel, experts in remote working and contact centre services.

Finding a job is not what it used to be. For our parents a high-school diploma, and a little hard work meant you could have a successful career. Then, it got just a little bit harder. You needed to get your college degree. As long as you got some sort of degree, you would usually come out landing a pretty good job. Things have since changed. You have to get a degree that translates into something, and you have to compete to beat out more people, for less jobs. This is what the economy has seemingly turned into. There is one promising career path that has some high paying prospects. It is a little bit unconventional for the most part, but also has some amazing benefits. The career path I am talking about it the online job market.

In terms of lifespan, the internet is in its youth. Online jobs are just getting started, and there are many positions to be filled. The need for tech people is growing each day, and by 2016, 6 million jobs are expected to be available for online workers – according to HubPages. That is a huge number, and no other field is coming close to match that growth. The one hard part about online jobs, is much of the time the jobs are not traditionally listed, so either people are not looking for work, or they are not looking in the right places.

Finding jobs online, although plentiful, can take a little bit more intuition. While it is very possible to search for jobs online, and land one, there are many that go unseen. The fact is you have to constantly be looking. Swap information through forums, email enticing proposals to webmasters showcasing your skills, and most important of all you need to have something to show for yourself. If you have nothing to show, start small and do your absolute best quality work each time you take on a project. You also might want to consider building a website offering your particular services. This will put some legitimacy behind your offers, and can boost you sales just by people coming across your website. If you do not know how to build a website, hire someone to do it, or you could even use a simple WordPress theme for starting off. Now you are ready to get going on some work.

One of the most obvious talents that the internet needs is web designers. If you have the talent already, then great. If you don’t, the truth is HTML, and CSS are pretty simple languages to use. Javascript is slightly more complicated but it is also considered one of the easiest programming languages to learn. Even things like jQuery (which is essentially an simplified way to use Javascript) can make things easier, and more professional looking. After you have the necessary skills to build websites you can get started. You can apply for hundreds of jobs around the internet, or just simply start your own business. This market is quite saturated, but there are few things that you can do to become successful. First, offer to build your friends, family, or associates a website, if they need it. This might be your best learning experience when getting started. It will be less stressful working with someone you know at first, and you can slowly build your confidence along the way. It is very important to finish projects in a timely manner, and do your absolute best work each time. This will allow start building a portfolio and a solid reputation.

Programmers, are usually the highest paid, and most needed skill workers for online jobs. Now you cannot become a programmer overnight, and it certainly is a lot of work to learn even the basics. However, this is a very rewarding process, both monetarily, and mentally. If you are thinking about going back to school, computer science or computer engineering might be your best bet. This is the one field that you can guarantee to land a job after school. If you already have programming knowledge you probably know this first hand. If you can compliment your programming skills with creative web development, then you will have the opportunity to punch your own ticket.

One thing that is great about online jobs is that most likely you already have the talents to start making some money. Online jobs are not limited to web development and programming, although they are the most obvious. One of the easiest jobs to get into is writing. Writing can mean a number of different things on the internet. Obviously people need content writing services. Some websites have thousands of pages, and they cannot write all of that content themselves. If you have the ability to write good content, and at a good pace, you can make a lot of money. You can even sign up for textbroker.com and start writing articles today to make some money. Another form of writing online is blogging. If you can provide interesting, controversial, or funny content you might find your self with a following. Blogging is easier than ever with WordPress of Joomla templates. Once you have traffic coming to your website, there are a bunch of ways to make money, usually through advertisements. Writing content, either for another company, or yourself, can be very profitable.

Competition has been building up on the internet over the past ten years. This means that it is getting harder and harder for businesses to be seen and attract business. This is where search engine optimization comes in. The concept of search engine optimization is in nature not that complicated. Basically, you have to optimize your site in the best way possible for sites like Google and Bing to index your pages appropriately. The problem for businesses is that it is very time consuming, and essentially performing SEO takes a much time as anything else. There are a few different things you can do for SEO. There is onsite SEO, which involves proper coding, using correct header tags, and optimizing your site around keywords. Consulting on these subjects can help out a clients website dramatically within a few weeks. Then there is offsite SEO. The most important of which is link building services. SEO is a dynamic service that can provide a lot of benefits for your clients. Although it is time consuming, it can pay off, and you will learn a lot in the process.

The online job market is growing. Whether you cannot find a job, or are just looking for something different, the internet may be the answer. Almost every business is taking the web jump, and landing online. This is out of necessity, and also because it is convenient and profitable to have an online presence. This is opening up a wide array of job opportunities. You may consider even going to school in a computer related field. One thing is for sure, the online job market is the best place to find work in todays economy. Even managing social media outlets is a marketing job that is available. Start looking around today, and you might find yourself landing in a new career.

This article was written by Ben Anderson. Ben works online doing freelance web development. He also works as an SEO consulting, as well as providing a white hat link building service.

Today is the start of a new feature on the ResumeBucket Blog, the Secret Jobs series.

For anyone that has been out of work and looking for a decent amount of time it may feel like you’ve exhausted all avenues for looking for work.  You’ve searched every job board, asked all of your friends if they know of openings, and spent hours perfecting your ResumeBucket and LinkedIn profiles.

But in times like these, a little creativity goes a long way.  And it is in that spirit that this series will explain some secretive and less well-known techniques that we’ve seen people use to help them in their job search.

Finding where your industry hangs out

This week’s entry for Secret Jobs involves online communities and how forming meaningful relationships online can earn you unpublished job leads and unusual industry insight.

The first thing we need to do though is find where people from your industry are hanging out.  And this might be the most difficult part of the process.

I can’t show examples from every industry under the sun, but I’ve chosen a couple that I think are general enough to give you ideas for your own industry search; marketing and sales.

Marketing is a pretty broad moniker, but let’s keep our prospects open; if you are looking for a job in online marketing wouldn’t you also be interested in a position for print marketing too?  Sales is a similar industry, experience in any form of sales usually transfers pretty well to other types of sales.

Reddit

The first place to search is Reddit.  It is most commonly known as a place to share links, but Reddit is also arguably the largest online community.  Within the site there are also sub-communities that can sometimes serve as the largest community for some career industries.

First, see if your industry has its own sub-Reddit, example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/marketing

http://www.reddit.com/r/sales

Marketing has a 2,000 member strong community on Reddit.  However, with the sales sub-Reddit’s last submission over a month ago it would appear as if this community is no longer active.

If you do find a populated sub-Reddit you can begin to interact here and get to know the members.  Make sure you become VERY familiar with the rules of the community and lurk a bit before you jump in.  But once you learn the ropes send messages to active members, submit questions, and add to the conversation.

Reddit also has a couple of communities that are geared specifically for helping people find work.  Once again, get a feel for how the community works before jumping into the conversation.  But even if you just check these once a day you could find positions not found anywhere else.

http://www.reddit.com/r/jobs

http://www.reddit.com/r/forhire

http://www.reddit.com/r/work

Twitter

If you don’t have an account with Twitter, get one now.  I’m not asking you to share with the world every mundane detail of your life, but look at it like another online job profile you need to create.

Once you have a profile complete with photo, bio, and location you can start finding people to follow.  Using the search function you want to look for people who are talking about things in your industry.  If there are current events happening in your industry, I would start by searching for these.  People who are discussion such recent events will probably be the most active in your industry on Twitter.

Once you have followed them keep an eye on their tweets, check your timeline a few times a day.  If you find something particularly interesting send them an @ reply with your own insight.  The goal is to form online friendships so down the road you could potentially ask them about any openings they know of.

And don’t forget to tweet yourself.  Make your tweets applicable to your industry; share news stories, comment about recent trends, etc.  When they see you are following them, you want them to see a fellow industry professional with plenty to share.

Google

Of course you can always find industry communities using the world’s most popular search engine.  I decided to start with Reddit and Twitter because Google can often be filled with clutter.

But if you search using some of the following queries you might just get lucky (replace Industry with your own industry).

Industry forum
Industry community
Industry Meet-up
Industry organization

Putting in work

Now that you have a target community the next step is to become one of them.

You shouldn’t exactly go into this community thinking you are infiltrating them just to find a job.  Even if you successfully find employment through the community, these are still places you should want to continue participating in.

With that in mind, participating in your community and making friends should be pretty straightforward.  The big question is how long do you need to wait before asking if there are employment opportunities here.  I think each community will be different and this is something you need to feel out on your own.  But I would say a good starting number would be a month.  Put in at least a month’s worth of relationship building before you ever bring up your self-interest.

The goal

Once you have made friends in your new community the optimal result is that they tell you about job opportunities unsolicited.  But if this hasn’t happened, simply ask them in a very polite way if they know of any openings at the moment.

These communities are built to help each other and every encounter I have ever had with an online industry community has been a positive one.  And once you do find a job, don’t forget to turn around and help someone else in the same way someone helped you.