After the protracted U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of us are keenly aware of how stressful it can be to serve in the military. Many enlisted men and women risk their lives every day. Military officers may not be on the front lines but their lives are often in danger and they have a job that may be even more stressful than worrying for their own well-being: they are responsible for the lives of those under their command.
Beyond those risks, military jobs come with more stresses. Enlisted personnel and officers must travel frequently, they do their work exposed to public scrutiny, and they have very little say over how they spend their time. They are also separated from family for months and sometimes years at a time. Soldiers must endure heavy physical demands, from boot camp and basic training to the rigors of duty, which can include not just war but aiding in natural disasters like the Filipino typhoon. Another challenge faced by enlisted personnel: Finding work after they have finished with the service. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, unemployment for post- 9/11 veterans was at 10% in August 2013, nearly 3% above the national average.
All of those stresses put enlisted military personnel and military general in the top two slots on CareerCast.com’s list of the most stressful jobs in 2013. The ranking comes from an annual best and worst jobs list that began in 1995 under the auspices of Dow Jones. In 2009 the the ranking moved over to CareerCast.com, a career and job listing website based in Carlsbad, Calif. The best and worst jobs listing, which ranks 200 jobs according to more than 100 criteria, comes out in April. This is the fourth year CareerCast has released a list of least and most stressful jobs, derived from its best and worst lists.
To gauge which jobs are the most stressful, CareerCast considered the 200 professions in its database and focused on 11 different job demands that it deemed likely to provoke stress, including travel, growth potential, competitiveness, physical demands, hazards, environmental conditions and risk to one’s own life or to others’.
Along with military jobs, there are several other positions on the top ten most stressful list that involve risk to one’s own life or responsibility for others’ lives. That includes firefighter, No. 3 on the list, airline pilot, No. 4, and police officer, No. 9.
Other jobs on the most stressful list that may seem surprising: public relations executive and senior corporate executive. Though many people may picture PR execs wining and dining and taking lunch with friends and connections around town, in fact they face almost constant rejection from people like me. I am subject to such an onslaught of PR email—usually more than 100 a day—I don’t even reply to most of the notes I get. I’m sure that is discouraging and stressful to anyone who approaches me.
Corporate executives likewise have an image that belies their work lives, says Lee. “They’re responsible for the livelihood of everyone who works at their company,” he notes. “If the company is public, they’re responsible for their shareholders.” Plus they travel constantly and work around the clock on a schedule that is not of their own making.
Then there is a profession that is close to my own, newspaper reporter, No. 8 on the list. In these times of newsroom austerity and mounting pressure to produce multi-media reports as news is breaking, while competing with lightning-fast social media and a plethora of blogs, this job deserves to be on the top ten list. Of course reporters also cover wars and assume some of the same risks as members of the military. Meantime, the market for old fashioned newspaper journalists continues to shrink, meaning that many reporters feel they must stay in unhappy, risky positions at a time when they would prefer to move on.
What is the use of these lists for the average reader? Lee says that most people who choose dangerous jobs like firefighter or police officer want to work in those fields despite the stress level. Some people have “the gene” for those jobs, as Lee puts it. But maybe a young person who reads this story will think twice about trying to become a newspaper reporter. though I think that journalists may have a gene for this high-stress profession too. Still, if you are a young person deciding on a career, check out the least stressful jobs list.
