Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2014. The Glassdoor ranking is from that month and is based on employee satisfaction ratings at the time. The “jobs booming by 2020” article it refers to is a 2013 forecast.
Your 20s can be a somewhat confusing time of life. We always say this is the ideal age to start saving and investing, although of course, to do that we need to work, and that first job won’t necessarily define the rest of our lives. We should treat it as training, a way of starting to build up what I call “scales”.
As far as possible, it’s also a good idea for that job to give us something, whether knowledge or the chance to combine it with our studies, because at 20 many young people are still working on a degree.
With that in mind, Glassdoor has selected the 10 best jobs for people in their 20s, based on how the workers themselves rated their job satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is very dissatisfied and 5 is very satisfied.
Let’s remember that at 20, unless you’re somebody’s son or daughter, as a rule nobody is going to make you chief executive of Banco Santander.
(Read: the 12 worst mistakes young people make in their 20s)
The full ranking was published as a graphic by Glassdoor/Business Insider. In Spain these job titles are often used in English anyway: curiously, Spanish job portals stopped advertising for a “programador informático” a long time ago and now look for a “software engineer” (presumably it sounds cooler). Below we explain a few things about the list.
As you might expect, jobs connected to the labour market’s new oil (technology, the internet, programming…), along with mechanical engineering and programming roles, are jobs where a person can learn and open up a future.
See also: 2 basic rules that will noticeably improve your CV
Mark Zuckerberg himself said that nowadays every young person should learn coding and programming just as they learn to use a mobile phone, because that knowledge can open many doors and, failing that, you can use it to work for yourself and build your own projects.
With the marketing manager, something similar happens in Spain as with the community manager: sometimes the companies themselves don’t know what they want from this professional, so in some job offers the role means selling, while in others it means a true marketing manager in charge of advertising campaigns.
What does a barista do?
Honestly, I didn’t know this profession existed until I saw it in the ranking. A barista is an expert in preparing coffees, drinks and cocktails. In other words, someone who can dress up your coffee with a whole range of flavours and decorations.
Waiting tables makes the ranking because it is one of the easiest jobs to get and allows flexible hours, so you can earn some extra money to cover your expenses.
A business analyst’s job is to study the company and spot business opportunities for its growth. Sometimes companies want someone to expand the business into other countries. At other times, the role is simply to improve the business model, making it more profitable by cutting operating costs with more innovative systems.
Other job opportunities for young people
We previously published several jobs that will be booming by 2020, although the truth is they are already in demand, and some of them could be considered less a job than the foundations of a possible business, with no shortage of options linked to new technologies.
But what young people have most of all is freelance work.
Most young people today can earn extra money, sometimes a far from negligible income, working for themselves or as freelancers.
More and more media outlets are looking for content writers, and judging by the quality and ethics of many of them, getting hired must have become easy. Likewise, social media work is a job a young person can get, managing a brand online.
Not to mention how easy it is nowadays for anyone who knows a subject well to give private lessons online.
Thanks to new technologies and the internet, it really shouldn’t be hard for a young person to make money and pick up different skills that will add to their experience later on.
Featured image: Markus Spiske, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
