____________________________________________________________________________ Introductionyou, whereas people in the workforce may be trying to discourage you from competing. Get
a variety of opinions to balance out possible biases.So, in reviewing the information in this book, please understand the limitations of the data.
You need to use common sense in career decision making as in most other things in life. We
hope that, by using that approach, you fi nd the information helpful and interesting.Data Complexities
For those of you who like details, we present some of the complexities inherent in our
sources of information and what we did to make sense of them here. You don’t need to
know these things to use the book, so jump to the next section of the introduction if
details bore you.We selected the jobs partly on the basis of economic data, and we include information
on earnings, projected growth, and number of job openings for each job throughout
this book. We think this information is important to most people, but getting it for
each job is not a simple task.Earnings
! e employment security agency of each state gathers information on earnings for various
jobs and forwards it to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.! is information is organized
in standardized ways by a BLS program called Occupational Employment Statistics, or
OES. To keep the earnings for the various jobs and regions comparable, the OES screens
out certain types of earnings and includes others, so the OES earnings we use in this book
represent straight-time gross pay exclusive of premium pay. More specifi cally, the OES
earnings include each job’s base rate; cost-of-living allowances; guaranteed pay; hazardous-
duty pay; incentive pay, including commissions and production bonuses; on-call pay; and
tips.! e OES earnings do not include back pay, jury duty pay, overtime pay, severance pay,
shift diff erentials, nonproduction bonuses, or tuition reimbursements. Also, self-employed
workers are not included in the estimates, and they can be a signifi cant segment in certain
occupations. When data on annual earnings for an occupation is highly unreliable, OES
does not report a fi gure, which meant that we reluctantly had to exclude from this book a
few occupations such as Hunters and Trappers.For each job, we report three fi gures related to earnings:!! e Annual Earnings fi gure shows the median earnings (half earn more, half earn less).
!! e Beginning Wage fi gure shows the 10th percentile earnings (the fi gure that exceeds
the earnings of the lowest 10 percent of the workers).! is is a rough approximation of
what a beginning worker may be off ered.!! e Earnings Growth Potential fi gure represents the ratio between the 10th percentile
and the median. In a job for which this fi gure is high, you have great potential for