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Job coach
- Median pay: $31,400
- % who say their job is stressful: 84.8%
Job coaches help people with physical, emotional or mental disabilities get and keep jobs.
They have to juggle field work with a ton of paperwork, said Thea Noel, who works for Goodwill Industries in Atlanta. A pressure-packed part of the job is negotiating with employers on behalf of her clients.
The pay is often low, especially for job coaches dealing with emotionally unstable clients, said Kim Mueser, executive director at the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation in Boston.
"The way our mental health system works, job coaches are paid at low rates compared with others in the rehab field," he said.
Source: Payscale
Methodology: Starting from a database of more than 9,000 jobs, PayScale used data from over 120,000 respondents who rated their jobs for quality of life factors. The top 15 were selected based on the national median pay for workers with at least five or seven years' experience and the percent of workers surveyed who said their jobs were "fairly stressful" or "extremely stressful." They were then ranked in order of pay, lowest to highest. Only jobs with median pay less than $50,000 were eligible., and only one job per "job family" was included. PayScale conducted the survey between August 2010 and August 2012.
Methodology: Starting from a database of more than 9,000 jobs, PayScale used data from over 120,000 respondents who rated their jobs for quality of life factors. The top 15 were selected based on the national median pay for workers with at least five or seven years' experience and the percent of workers surveyed who said their jobs were "fairly stressful" or "extremely stressful." They were then ranked in order of pay, lowest to highest. Only jobs with median pay less than $50,000 were eligible., and only one job per "job family" was included. PayScale conducted the survey between August 2010 and August 2012.
- Last updated March 07 2013 08:59 AM ET
