The professions listed on our list of high paying jobs with the highest satisfaction rates are obviously everyone’s dream. But the catch here is this: job satisfaction for one individual will be entirely different from what someone else would consider contentment.
The most prominent example that comes to my mind is that of introverts and extroverts. For an extrovert, a sales job involving abundant interaction with new people may well be the perfect job while for an introvert like me, the same job would be an utter nightmare and I’m speaking from personal experience here. Likewise, the most satisfying careers for introverts (which incidentally you can find here) might not do justice to extroverts. And while we’re on the topic, I have all the sympathy for you introverts so in case you’re really struggling and don’t even have a degree to your name, I would really recommend giving our article on the high paying jobs for introverts without a degree or experience a quick look. Trust me, it’s hard being an introvert, especially in the corporate world, so you should take all the help you can get.
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I am deviating from the topic though, as is my norm. The reason for me elaborating how subjective the term “job satisfaction” is, was not to hint to you that our list isn’t reliable. It was simply to make you cautious that these jobs with highest satisfaction rates may not apply to all categories of people. That being said, they are definitely one of the best jobs one can have the pleasure of performing.
So how exactly did we determine the highest job satisfaction 2017? We referred to this comprehensive list by PayScale, which enumerates the job satisfaction rate and job meaning rate of more than 500 job titles based on an extensive survey. Meaning, you can also find out the most meaningful careers here: the top 3 are clergymen/women, postsecondary English teachers, and surgeons, in case you were wondering. If you were to say merely meaning isn’t enough for you and you’re looking for meaningful jobs that pay well too, well then medical specialties are by far the best fit for you, as they pay considerably higher amounts than other meaningful jobs. Even nurses don’t do so bad, something you can examine more deeply in the 7 happiest highest job satisfaction nursing specialties. All these occupations require higher education though, so fulfilling jobs without a degree might be a little difficult to find. One could always go for the clergy, but then again, not everyone is into religion. In that case, community and social service jobs would be suitable since they have the highest meaning rate among job categories and do not require much education.
To give you more perspective, let me tell you what meaning and satisfaction actually mean here. Well, the former represents the percentage of affirmative answers when asked the question “Does your work make the world a better place?”, while the latter means the percentage of positive replies when asked: “How satisfied are you in your job?” With that in mind, we sought to determine the list of careers with the highest job satisfaction. However, due to some ties, we ended up with 19 jobs. From there we ranked them on the basis of their mean annual wage, the numbers of which we extracted from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Although PayScale also provided median salary amounts, they pertain to the year 2015 when the survey was conducted, so we decided to update the numbers using the BLS website. And like that, we incorporated the effects of both earning and contentment in our list of high paying jobs with the highest satisfaction rates.
