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New careers driven by personal interests, market forces
(Newsday (Melville, NY) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jan. 8--Six years ago Lisa Endee was on her way to becoming a respiratory therapist when she decided to take a class in sleep disorders. It was a move that stretched her career in an unexpected, though related, direction -- one that's turned out to be on the sizzling side of hot.
Endee, 31, went on to become the lead technologist in the sleep disorders center at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip. During the past two or three years she has seen growing awareness as emerging research in the relatively new discipline of sleep medicine is released. More physicians are sending patients for screening, she says, mindful that chronic sleep disorders are estimated to affect as many as 40,000 Americans, with 70 million experiencing lesser sleep problems. And those problems are worsened by the nation's epidemic of obesity, which can aggravate or bring about sleep disorders.
And as new sleep clinics open, there's a need for technologists to monitor sleeping patients' brain waves, eye movements and sleep levels, as well as analyze the results. On Long Island, Endee says, "everyone knows everyone in [the field of] sleep. People call and say, 'Do you know anyone? I have a friend who's opening a lab.' "
The recognition that sleep disorders play a significant role in health issues, such as hypertension, is just one of the forces giving rise to this growing profession. It's one thin slice of the overall health-care practitioners/technical occupations category, which is expected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to grow by 25.8 percent through 2014 as the population ages, bringing about a need for more health care services.
Other forces giving rise to new careers -- or jump-starts to traditional ones -- include new government regulations compelling organizations to better guard and manage data; homeland security; and the digitalization of just about everything. Look, too, to www.career voyages.gov, a collaboration of the U.S. Labor and Education departments, for new occupation prospects in the growing fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology and geospatial technology.
Our technology-driven economy is changing at what career expert Richard Bayer calls a "staggering pace." Still, those who have resolved to move into work that appears to be more secure, rewarding or better-paying would be wise to appreciate that what's hot today may well cool down tomorrow, says Bayer, chief operating officer for the Manhattan-based Five O'Clock Club, a career-counseling network. Just think of those U.S. programmers, he says, whose jobs are now sizzling over in India.
Bayer advises job hunters and career changers to base a move not on the degree of demand alone, but on how well a job matches up with genuine, long-term interests -- which will motivate workers to keep up with their field's latest developments.
There's no way to tell to what degree emerging professions will feed into the 18.9 million jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects to come about by 2014. But Jerome Pikulinski in Arlington, Texas, a retired Bureau of Labor Statistics economist, who, among other things, studied new and emerging occupations for the U.S. Labor Department, says he expects that at any given time about 20 percent of jobs are in some state of flux -- be it developing into more enhanced positions or morphing right out of existence.
In his most recent look at emerging occupations, based on 2001 data, Pikulinski found the following new positions:
--Genetic counselors, to educate and offer counseling on the prospect of individuals', or their offspring's, developing certain illnesses;
--Tissue coordinators and technicians, who work in biomedical labs that produce new tissue cultures;
--Pharmacokineticists, to help create dosage standards for drugs.
As for professions getting a second wind because of a new trend or technology, he found:
--Underwater divers, needed in a security capacity to inspect docks and wharves;
--Medical specimen couriers, to transport urine samples because drug testing for potential new hires has increased;
--Perfume mixers, to work at a growing number of small perfume distributors.
One new wireless method for tracking and gathering data on materials and products at all phases of the production and distribution chain -- radio frequency identification -- is expected in the coming years to create a number of new engineering, design and technical jobs. Within two years, radio frequency trackers will alert manufacturers and retailers when a product needs to be restocked on the shelf, says Douglas Neary, chief operating officer of the International RFID Business Association. Within five years, he says, a consumer will be able to swipe a prescription bottle past a reader to determine the "pedigree" of what's inside, where and when the drug was made, as well as its shipping history.
Gartner, a Stamford, Conn.-based information technology research/analysis firm, projects that worldwide spending on radio frequency identification hardware and software will jump from an estimated $504 million in 2005 to $3 billion by 2010.
As for Elizabette Cohen of Melville, the forces that came together to bring about her new side business were her concern for the environment coupled with a near-miss in becoming a victim of identity theft.
Cohen, a full-time veterinarian, last year opened a separate business, A+ Secure Shredding Services Inc. It's a document destruction firm that services nonprofits, government offices, small-business owners such as certified public accountants, and even private consumers looking to keep personal data safe from identity crooks. As public awareness increases and the government looks to mandate certain identity protection procedures, the information destruction business is growing fast, says Bob Johnson, executive director of the National Association for Information Destruction. Its company membership has grown from 200 to 700 in the past three years.
With the shredded documents being recycled, Cohen sees it as a way to ultimately save trees and homes for wild animals. And she's on a mission to increase awareness. "I believe in good karma," she says.
Some new jobs will even "emanate mostly from jobholders themselves," says Richard W. Samson, director of the EraNova Institute, a Mountain Lakes, N.J.-based think tank. Here's how he puts it in the November/December issue of The Futurist magazine: "These won't be jobs you look for, but jobs you make -- jobs that need doing, solving the pressing problems that you are uniquely qualified to solve "
That's just how things developed with Teresa Dillman, 35, marketing executive at Alexander Wall Corp., a Ronkonkoma-based property-damage restoration firm. Three years ago she attended an educational session on disaster preparedness. "A light bulb went on," says Dillman, a former sociology major, who suggested her company develop expertise in emergency management and host seminars for prospective clients on how to plan ahead for major disasters, be they hurricanes, power outages, fires.
To develop her own knowledge, she has enrolled in a new certificate program in emergency management at Adelphi University, which also has just launched a master's degree program in emergency nursing and disaster management.
Still in marketing and business development, Dillman sees her own job as now incorporating more of an educational resources-provider role. "My sales hat isn't so heavy," she says.
In the online marketing world, two trends -- social networking and companies' looking to get to know customers better -- are coming together in enhancing a job that had its origins when message boards became popular and needed a policing presence. Today's professional online community facilitators, though, are doing far more than pulling the plug on posters who use naughty words.
For Rocky Prozeller, 26, it has been a way to pull together three previous jobs in marketing, public relations and journalism. For a little more than a year he's been an online communities consultant with Watertown, Mass.-based Communispace, which runs 200 customer communities for the likes of Charles Schwab, Frito-Lay, Hallmark, Scholastic and Jockey.
Such ongoing "private, more intensive communities" are "a way of hard-wiring the voice of consumers into the business," says Julie Schlack, Communispace vice president of innovation. Facilitators pose questions to communities of 300 to 400 customers, share announcements, think up engaging activities, and sit back and observe conversations. They're always on the lookout for trends and insights to share with clients.
"Think of a focus group -- only on steroids," says Mollie Garberg, 43, a facilitator who joined the company two years ago after a seven-year hiatus from the for-pay work world while she raised her children.
In the past three years Communispace has grown by 50 percent, adding 14 hires last year in facilitator and related jobs, and it added another five jobs in the first week of 2006.
As for Prozeller, he oversees a gift card community, two for financial services firms, several youth groups, including one for a young men's fragrance firm. He says conversation topics range from "mutual funds one minute to how to get a date the next."
It's an emerging role, he says, that "coincides with the natural evolution of marketing."
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