But some things are looking up, career-wise

Yesterday was a bad news blog day, focusing as it did on a set of jobs that will be going bye-bye in the next decade.

Au revoir, correspondence clerk. Fare-thee-well, sewing machine operator.

Today’s more upbeat, more go-go, more world on a string.

I give you, “Eight Emerging Careers for 2013”, courtesy of Monster, a roundup of “bright-outlook occupations” that the US Department of Labor considers emerging.

Forget farmer. That Homer Hayseed stuff is so yesterday. What you want to be these days is a precision agriculture technician, who use GPS and GIS technology to advise farmers on what to plant where, how much to water, and what to do about pesticides. And if you’re not wild about that job title, you can call yourself a precision agronomist or a nutrient management specialist. The pay’s not great – $43K is the median – but most of the jobs are likely located in spots where the cost of living is not quite as high as it is in Manhattan or San Francisco.

Higher up the pay scale, mechatronics engineers make about double that. But unlike a precision agronomist, who gets the satisfaction of seeing a corn stalk push it’s little head-y up, a mechatronics engineer’s job is to decrease the number of jobs there are by figuring out how to automate industrial tasks. (Do they eventually design themselves out of a job by automating mechatronics?)

Maybe it’s just me, but energy broker sounds a bit sketchy. A bit too Enron-ish, perhaps. I’m channeling Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Still, as long as there’s energy, there’ll probably always be demand for energy brokers, who buy and sell energy at the behest of financial service firms and energy companies.

If you want to work for WalMart – and who doesn’t – go become a logistics analyst. Monitor all that cool RFID tagging technology to figure out whether they need blue sweaters in Pocatello, and/or Furbies in Flagstaff, and how to get them from here to there, by way of letting the supply chain in China know what you want them to gear up for.

If laboring in and for Benton, Arkansas is of limited appeal, biostatisticians student disease patterns, and try to figure out how to make healthcare delivery more efficient. (If you can do that, you’re worth every penny of that $74K median salary.)

Cytogenetic technologists “look for indicators of genetic abnormalities in fetuses and are increasingly studying genetic signatures of various cancers and indicators of genetic diseases.” Which sounds incredibly useful, while also incredibly, mind-numbingly boring, in a kind of fascinating way. (And I will confess to being a tad bit disappointed with this one. I had first thought it said “cryogenic technologist.” Which led me to conclude that enough of the more narcissistic of the Baby Boomers are starting to die, or have come to the realization that dying is actually a possibility, pumping up demand to be quiescently frozen until someone figures out how to re-animate a freeze-dried carcass.)

And speaking of Baby Boomers, our collective aging will spur “demand for products and workplaces that are less physically demanding”. Which will, ergo, create the need for ergonomists (or human factors engineers). For starters, how about a keyboard you can type on incessantly that doesn’t result in your developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Can’t hurt to ask.

If you want to make decent money – median salary is $90K – while doing some good, environmental economists “help protect the environment by determining the economic impact of policy decisions relating to air, water, land and renewable-energy resources.” That’s what the good ones do, anyway. The bad ones help destroy the environment by whoring it up for energy companies.

I might have enjoyed being a logistics analyst, an ergonomist, an environmental economist (of the non-whoring variety). But nothing here to make me regret my career choice. Now if short-story writer had been on the list of jobs of and with a future. Where do I sign up?