5 hot jobs you can get without a college education
N OT everyone wants to go to college.
The mere idea of spending four or more years trudging between university lecture halls, writing papers and taking exams is more than some people can bear — not to mention the cost of tuition, and the burden of student-loan debt.
While it’s often thought that those who opt out of college limit their employability, career options and earning potential, that’s not necessarily the case.
“There are plenty of great jobs that pay well for people who don’t have degrees,” says Dawn Fay, New York-area president of human resources consultancy Robert Half.
At the end of the day, she says, college degrees don’t make or break careers. When she asks managers what was special about their best hires, the answers tend to be things like “she’s a team player” or “he shows initiative.”
“It’s never about whether they went to college, or where,” Fay says.
What jobs are we talking about? We looked at New York City-area data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Glassdoor, Indeed.com and LinkedIn, and then crosschecked the data with hiring managers to make sure they had actual vacancies.
So here are the hottest jobs that don’t require a degree.
App developers
There are more than 3 million apps available in the Google Play store and more than 2.2 million in Apple’s app store, never mind the millions on Facebook. Each one has been coded by someone. Someone who doesn’t necessarily have a college degree or even a reputation for being a geek.
“Everyone can, and should, learn to code,” says Avi Flombaum, dean of the Flatiron School in the Financial District. It is one of several boot-camp-style technology schools in the city — and online — that teach ordinary folks to build apps in 15 weeks or less. Flombaum says that 97 percent of Flatiron graduates get placed in jobs.
According to Glassdoor, the average salary for an app developer in New York City is $97,789.
Administrative services managers
It pays to excel in minding other people’s business — their calendars, agendas, mail, meetings, priorities — and orchestrating details so that everything runs smoothly. It’s not the kind of thing you study in college, but something that you learn to do on the job, over time, Fay says.
“You might start as an executive assistant or in customer services, and then become an office manager,” she says. The people who get to the next rung of that ladder are especially in high demand, reports Indeed.com. Administrative services managers can earn as much as $110,000 in the NYC area.
Loan officers
Sure, to work in banking you have to be good at math, but what you learned in high school may be enough to start you off in the lending industry.
“I love hiring smart kids,” says George Lazaridis, president of Quontic Bank’s lending division, adding that he prefers training people from scratch.
And while the starting pay might be under $20 an hour, “the bright ones pick up and can earn more quickly,” says Lazaridis.
According to Glassdoor data, loan officers can earn more than $139,000.
Certified computer professionals
“It’s an absolute myth that you have to have a degree in computer science to earn a healthy living working in the tech industry,” says Todd Thibodeaux, president and chief executive officer of CompTIA, a technology industry association.
Not only that, but having the right certification will give you a leg up on people who only have bachelor’s degrees because passing the exam is proof that you have the skills.
Anyone can sign up and take a course, although six to 12 months of actual lab experience is recommended. Workers who have the basic CompTIA+ certification, for example, earn around $50,000. Add a second certification, and your paycheck goes up to $80,000. Pre-certification courses are available nationwide and online. The average salary in the industry is $108,900.
Business drivers
Good business-to-business salespeople are hard to find. Those who consistently meet their quotas are rare. So while some companies list a degree as a prerequisite for employment, they will sometimes forgo the requirement for recruits who are perennially successful and can deliver, says Eliot Burdett, CEO of Peak Sales Recruiting in the Financial District.
“If a hiring manager is in a hurry to fill a role and needs to choose between a person who can eat the competition for lunch and a person who has a degree, they’ll choose the performer,” he says.
Sales managers in Manhattan earn an average of $89,238, reports Indeed.com, with a few superstars making more than $200,000.