ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 8, 1996 TAG: 9602080022
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: C-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Boston Globe
FUNERAL HOME management tops the list of the best 50 managerial occupations, says a research company.
Sometimes the best jobs would surprise you.
Take funeral parlor management, for instance.
That essential but macabre line of work came out No.1 on a ``Top 50'' list of managerial occupations compiled by Cognetics Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., research company.
In a new report called ``Hot Jobs: The Best Places to Work in America,'' Cognetics ranked the best industries to work in and the best types of employers for 24 occupational groups. It based its rankings on the number of job openings, salaries, job security and growth potential.
It may surprise some people that jobs at large funeral companies topped the roster of managerial occupations.
``In general, a lot of stereotypes don't hold up well,'' said David Birch, president of Cognetics.
Being a funeral director, he noted, carries high job security and pay. Indeed, the funeral business was 10th among 219 industries ranked by Cognetics on job retention and 49th on pay.
``It pays pretty well, there's enormous stability, and the population is aging. There's only one demographic constant in the world - one death per person. Birth rates vary, but everybody dies,'' said Birch.
After the funeral business, the best managerial positions are in midsized advertising companies.
The best sales positions are at large car dealers, followed by midsized hardware stores and midsized mobile home retailers. And in health care, physicians came out on top, followed by chiropractors.
In general, midsized companies (of 20 to 99 workers) are the most attractive places to work when job security, job openings, growth potential and pay are taken into account, said Birch. That contrasts with large employers (100 or more workers), which generally have few openings, and the smallest (fewer than 20 workers), most of which ``are very stagnant and don't have many openings,'' he said.
Cognetics also ranked 219 industries on average pay, job security, and growth opportunities.
Securities brokers earned the most ($53,504 a year on average), followed by chiropractors ($51,250) and physicians ($50,859).
The most secure positions, the report found, were at the U.S. Postal Service, which retained 95 percent of its jobs over the past four years. Hospitals came in second, with 86 percent of jobs preserved - something of a surprise, given the recent downsizing among hospitals. When it came to growth - measured by the percentage of employees in a given industry working at growing companies - leather products manufacturing came out on top.
``The old standards of what used to make for a good job - high wages in a large, secure company - have fallen apart over the past 10 to 15 years,'' the Cognetics report noted. ``The new job market is very different. More than anything else, it's fractured - broken into thousands of less well-known pieces rather than a few obvious employers.''
Cognetics' rankings were based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Dun & Bradstreet and other sources.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB