It isn’t always easy to roll out of bed on a Monday morning and go to work, but it’s definitely a whole lot easier if you’re aware that your job helps you do some good for people. Here are some jobs that you could look into that will enable you to help make the world a better place.
Teaching
Everyone knows that teaching is one of the most challenging jobs. From keeping up with governments, school districts and local authorities that are constantly changing what they expect from you to dealing with people who think you get to go home at three-thirty every day (as if!), teaching is full of challenges. Young people are often an absolute delight to work with, but they’re also often temperamental and difficult, and you’ll spend your evenings, weekends and lunch breaks working flat out for people who often don’t seem all that appreciative of your help.
However, it’s one of the most rewarding jobs out there as well as challenging – not only are those temperamental young people full of laughs and ideas, but managing to explain something and see the light go on in their eyes is a really magical experience. It’s a job where you can be artistic and creative, and where your fellow colleagues are as driven and passionate as you are about delivering good educations and good futures to young people.
Medicine
If you want to work in the medical field, there are plenty of different options. If you love problem solving and you’ve always been great at science, then perhaps being a doctor is for you. If you’d rather work more closely with your patients and their families and you’re more invested in the idea of providing actual care, then you might consider nursing – you can find nursing jobs in staffnurse.com for some ideas of future job possibilities.
Nursing can be a difficult job – the shifts can be at odd times of the day and can last for a long time, and you might just find that you barely even get any breaks to sit down, let alone a real lunch break! You also need to bear in mind that in order to be a nurse, you’ll need to be very emotionally sensitive and perceptive – you’re spending time with people at probably the worst times of their lives, so you need to be in tune with the people you’re working with so that you can provide the best possible care.
Animal Shelter Worker
If you’ve always loved working with animals, then why not consider working at an animal shelter? It’s always best to go for a no-kill shelter – kill shelters put down animals very easily and if you’re an animal lover, you might find that very distressing. There are a number of different roles you can take on at an animal shelter – if your background is in office work then you can always work in admin (you might get to visit the cats and dogs at lunch time!) or in their communications or PR departments.
If you’re a qualified vet, then an animal shelter is a great place to work, whether it’s officially or offering your time and expertise as a volunteer. Seeing your favorite animals go to their forever homes with their brand new owners will be one of the most satisfying feelings of your life. You also need to bear in mind that you can work at an animal shelter at the evenings or weekends if you have another job – they’re always looking for volunteers to help walk and socialize the animals.
Social Work
Social workers often tend to get a bad rap, but it’s important to remember that the cases that make it into the newspapers are the ones that didn’t go well – there are social workers working incredibly hard every day to help the lives of vulnerable people like children, the disabled and the elderly, to make sure that they live happy and safe lives. Social work can feel like a thankless profession and it’s definitely true that there’s a lot of red tape and paperwork. But the amount of things that would slide through the cracks without the hard and dedicated work of social workers is unimaginable.
If you want to change and help the lives of vulnerable people at a ground level then social work could be the key to your career happiness. You could also work as a carer, which might entail helping people eat, bathe themselves and get out of bed each day. Not only will you be helping them out physically but you’ll also be providing some much needed social contact and conversation that they might not otherwise get day to day.
Fostering
Being a foster carer means that you’ll come into contact with kids who have been through terrible things, from babies born addicted to drugs to teenagers who have experienced terrible abuse from the people who were supposed to care for them the most. In order to be a foster carer, you need to be a calm and capable person who is aware that their job requires them to work 24/7 without any real breaks. You also need to be one of the most caring people out there.
However, it’s important to have good foster carers out there to help damaged kids heal as much as they can – it’s one of the most rewarding jobs as well as one of the most difficult, and you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you are truly making the world a better place by helping damaged young people and providing them with a feeling of safety and security. Foster carers help these young people to heal before sending them on their way to more permanent forever homes – it’s one of the hardest and most important jobs out there.
Conservation
In this day and age, it’s important to have plenty of people around who are passionate about working to care for and protect the environment. Happily, there are a number of different areas in which you can do this. Energy auditing might not sound very interesting, but it will enable you to figure out where buildings and companies are using too much energy – perhaps the building isn’t particularly secure so heat is leaking out.
It’ll be your job to save the company money, and to save energy and the earth’s resources, by fixing that. You could also work at a non profit that focuses on conservation projects, for instance promoting solar energy or saving the bees. You don’t automatically have to be a scientist to work at a company like that – there are plenty of other areas that you could focus on to help promote the conservation message.
Scientist
If you’ve always loved science then you can really work to make breakthroughs in your chosen field that can enrich and even save lives, whether that’s from researching medicine to working on sustainable energy sources. Remember that you don’t have to focus on huge projects like trying to cure cancer. What a lot of scientists do to save our work and to help people in need is to focus on treatments that will help to keep people comfortable, like anti-nausea medication and treatments for people going through chemotherapy.
You could even focus on other areas of research, like the way that animals and therapy can help older people with dementia. Science isn’t all about being stuck in a laboratory surrounded by test tubes – it’s also about making our world a more happy and comfortable place for people to live in.
