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DomAviator -> RE: A/anyone Have Any Vocational Advice? (6/15/2008 1:42:43 AM)
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People will probably think that I am kidding about this - but the one profession that will never go away is Funeral Director. I have two buddies who have gone back to college to get an associates degree in Mortuary Science and they are making bank in what is essentially a part time job. (Figure a small home that does 40 cases a year is still doing almost a half a million gross with an average funeral cost in the USA of $12,000.) Unlike nursing, your "patients" wont give you lip or talk back to you or become combative, or sue you. Don't be grossed out by the "sticking needles in dead people" thing either - doctors, nurses, and paramedics (and in some states even EMTs) all stick needles in the dead - and nobody ever says "Ewwww youre a trauma surgeon you touch dead people" LOL Plus, funeral direction can never be outsourced as you cannot very well ship granny to India to be embalmed or wait for some guy to fly from bangladesh to make the removal from your home!
Another one thats kind of "out there" but a cash cow - crime scene clean up. A friend of mine who is a crime scene investigator actually started a hell of a lucrative side business doing this. After a crime there is a lot of stuff that needs to be cleaned up - body fluids, fingerprint powder, luminol, drug residues and chemicals, tear gas, pepper spray, explosive residues from flash bang grenades etc... She gets between $8,000 and $12,000 to clean up after a meth lab raid because of the hazardous chemicals and $1200 to $1800 to clean up after a simple "decided to paint the cieling with his brains" suicide - depending on how messy it was. All good money, billed to the state crime victims fund....
For someone with giant balls and a tiny brain - there is a mint to be made in commercial diving. You need to either join the Navy or to go to a school and spend about 6 months on the job as a "tender" earning dirt ($7 or $8 an hour) and eating shit (carry this, scrub that, etc) but once you "break out" as a diver you can make serious money... After he left the Navy my dad opened a commercial diving business, and I broke out with them as a teenager so I had the logbook and certs. Once when I was between flying gigs in a bad economy I went back to diving and made $30,000 in about six weeks. You dont have to be in the oil patch - divers inspect every dam or bridge in America, work in HazMat pools and industrial tanks, clear zebra mussles out of intakes and outflows, rerack fuel in nuclear reactors, and even uplug wastewater treatment plants... (yes thats right, diving in the sewage treatmant plant!) wherever there is water there is diving work - even bringing up SUV's that idiots put through the ice! Base hourly pay rates can seem kind of low, but when you add in hazard pay (contaminated water), penetration pay (being inside something that prevents a direct ascent to the surface) , welding pay, depth pay beyond 100 feet, etc you can make a nice pile of money fast. However, you WILL get hurt. The question is only when and how badly. Its to be expected when you are arc welding while submerged in water and using power tools by feel in the dark and under hyperbaric pressures. However, if you are reasonably careful you will only "get hurt" not become seriously injured. (like I barely knicked myself with a chainsaw once, and I had a brain fart and forgot to call for "power off" before I changed a welding rod (OUCH!), and I got bent (decompression sickness - which is several hours of screaming agony in a decompression chamber will the bubbles come out of your blood.) Its not safe but its fun, lucrative, and as close as you can come to being an astronaut without leaving earth.
As for the IT thing - I agree in part on the web design. But, to make any money at that you really have to be in your own business. If you are in your own business you can make great money. However, as far as working for someone - the guys who do the flash and development of web and CD based training for my main business are in the Phillipines and they make $3 per hour. LOL Thats one of my sideline businesses - when they arent working on my stuff, they are working on stuff I bring in from outside clients. I bill $30 - $45 an hour depending on the type of work and its done by $3 an hour labor in the Phillipines. So, just make sure you are the American developer dealing with the client and not the poor schmuck working for a developer because thats easily outsourced.
Oh and one other thing, and I cant stress this enough - dont get excited and say "holy crap domaviator has these guys do the work for $3 and he pockets between $27 and $42 per hour" and run off and start a web design business! MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING! Ie learn how to do it YOURSELF and then hire someone else to do it for you. A surprising number of these foreign freelancers will fuck you if they think they can. Real world example, If you dont know any better you will pay an invoice for 17 hours to install osCommerce, however if you took the time to learn how to do it yourself you will be able to say "Bullshit, what did you do for the other 16 hours and 50 minutes?" Some of them are as crooked as a dogs hind leg and a stupid as a pile of turds. Another "real world example" I had a woman who did work on a training program, that I know took around 35 hours to do, turn in a time sheet for 206.5 hours. Now, I dont know what planet she was doing the work on - but on the third rock from the sun there are only 168 hours in a week (24x7) - so its pretty amazing that she managed to work 29.5 hours per day for a week straight, without taking time out to eat, sleep, shit, etc... If you are going to go into business for yourself, which is the very best thing you can do, make sure that you learn everything there is to know and that you as the owner can do each and every job in the place. One of the reasons I went to community college at night to become a licensed airframe and powerplant mechanic - I wasnt going to let a mechanic have me by the balls, I wasnt gonna be at ones mercy if he quits, and I wasnt going to sit back and let him take 3 days to do a 2 hour job. More than once I have walked out into the hangar to ask what the hold up is, heard an absolute bullshit excuse, and told a guy who didnt know that I had an A&P ticket in my pocket that he could take the rest of the week off without pay to think about his work ethic while I finished the job and signed it off for return to service. If they come back on Monday morning its amazing how much simpler everything is and how much more rapidly they work. [:D] If you open a business, make sure you can do every job in it from sweeping the floors on up... Don't even rely on your bookeeper - know how to get into Quickbooks and to have a look around before he or she has a chance to cook the books and to make them seem right.
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