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The Most Stressful Jobs Of 2013

This article is more than 10 years old.

With the protracted U.S. involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of us are well aware of how stressful it can be to serve in the military. 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 also have a job that may be 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 hurricane Sandy. 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 October 2012, more than 2% 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 the Wall Street Journal. In 2009 the Journal dropped the ranking and it 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 third 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 risks to one’s own life or being responsible for others’ lives. That includes firefighter, number three on the list, commercial airline pilot, number four, and police officer, number ten. Taxi driver, number nine on the list, also involves more risk than most people may think, says Tony Lee, CareerCast’s publisher. “Taxi driver is the number one job to be targeted by a criminal act,” he says. “They get robbed, they get shot. It’s very stressful because they’re never sure who they’re picking up or what that person’s agenda might be.”

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, 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. Lee also points out that PR clients are never satisfied. If the PR executive succeeds in convincing Forbes.com to cover something, the client will most likely say great, but what about The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.

Corporate executives likewise have an image that belies their work lives, says Lee. “Many people think they kick back at 5pm and have a drink before taking the corporate jet,” he notes. The reality is that top executives travel constantly, miss their families and work around the clock on a schedule that is not of their own making.

Then there are two professions that are close to my own, photojournalist and newspaper reporter. In these times of newsroom austerity and mounting pressure to produce multi-media reports about news as it is breaking, it is not surprising that these two jobs would make the top ten list. Of course those jobs can also mean covering wars and assuming some of the same risks as members of the military. Meantime, the market for 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? If you are young and getting ready to embark on a career, you may think twice before joining the military or becoming a police officer or for that matter, a reporter. For those in mid-career contemplating a change, the list of least stressful careers could yield some attractive options.