Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2013. The percentages of parents who do not understand each job (43%, 52%, 61%, 62%, about 80%) come from a 2013 LinkedIn survey, Bring In Your Parents Day.
Many parents can’t explain what their children do for a living, even though those children earn good salaries.
A recent global LinkedIn survey identified the jobs that many adults find hard to understand. And it isn’t just parents: when it comes to explaining some of these jobs, you’ll have to go into detail even with many of your friends before they get it.
1. Investment banking
According to the survey, 43% of parents wouldn’t know what this job involves exactly, especially now that bankers have earned a bad reputation in recent years. How do you explain it to your parents?
“In theory, working in investment banking means bringing together people who have money with other people or institutions that need it. We help companies that issue bonds, shares and equity stakes, and we also help companies that buy other companies.”
2. Sociologist
52% of parents don’t understand it, because they confuse it with a therapist or a psychologist. How do you explain it?
“We study people’s beliefs and behavior by analyzing surveys and interviews.”
3. Community manager or social media manager
61% of parents don’t understand it, which makes me think the other 39% must be very smart, because I’m the first to get lost with this job: sometimes even the companies looking for community managers don’t really know what this kind of professional does. (Read: What a community manager is and isn’t.) To explain briefly what a social media manager does, we could say:
“We are in charge of communicating with users and potential customers on the main social networks on behalf of the company we work for.”
4. Data scientist
62% don’t understand it, and this job really is a step up. A brief explanation:
“We analyze the information collected and identify patterns that help a company’s leaders make better decisions.”
5. Actuary
Close to 80% don’t understand what this job involves, even though it is among the highest-rated professions for the future. How can you explain it simply?
“An actuary uses statistics to work out and analyze the risk of a person or a company based on their past behavior, in order to estimate the cost of insuring them against future risks.”
6. User interface designer
Few people outside the tech world would understand what this job involves. This professional designs or adapts the parts of a web application or piece of software to encourage users to interact with it, and so increase the chances that users click where the company wants them to click, sign up or end up buying something.
But there’s more
How would you explain to your parents that you get paid to lie on a bed or to play video games, when they actually consider those a waste of time? When we looked at the 8 strangest jobs out there, we saw that, rather than being hard to explain, the challenge with these jobs is convincing someone that we get paid for them, sometimes large sums of money.
See also: Businesses with a future: more ideas
Those jobs included:
- 7. Gold stackers: a job with a yearly salary, even though they work only a few days a year.
- 8. Bed tester: others would call it traveling or going on vacation.
- 9. Keeper of the Cup: some people would do it for free.
- 10. Water slide tester.
- 11. Teddy bear repair technician.
- 12. Razor blade tester.
- 13. Professional mermaid.
In the coming years, the vast majority of new jobs will be related to new technologies and the internet. We put together a roundup of the jobs and professions in demand online.
Further reading
Featured image: Robin Wendell, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
