Best Careers for People Passionate About Helping Others

Best Careers for People Passionate About Helping Others

People are motivated by different things when choosing careers. For some, their goal is to find stability and job security. For others, it is landing a hefty salary and good benefits. Still more are primarily interested in finding a role that is engaging or interesting.

And for some people, they are specifically interested in pursuing a career that allows them to provide value to people and make meaningful impacts on their lives.

If you are interested in a career that allows you to help people, here is a helpful list of ideas to get you started (including some ideas that might surprise you).

The Regulars – Careers in This Category Everyone Knows About

A few career path options have reputations for being altruistic or person-centered. Career choices like social work, counseling, medicine, and firefighting might top this list.

Social workers help underprivileged, vulnerable, or underserved individuals within a community or area receive appropriate services, look for jobs, get medical care, find housing, or secure other subsistence and life needs.

They can be found in a wide range of settings and role types. Counselors, psychotherapists, and psychologists apply specialized training to help individuals with a variety of mental health or neurological needs. Medical professionals engage the population’s health needs and keep the healthcare system operating effectively. Firefighters (and other civil service professionals) do their part to keep populations safe and prevent, mitigate, and combat dangerous situations.

Each of these careers can vary widely not only from each other but within their own various subtypes. Even just these four offer wide potential diversity based on types of education and training required, typical working environments, populations with which they might interact, average salaries, and other metrics.

However, for individuals who aren’t interested in pursuing one of those careers, there are actually a large number of career pathways that also help people. Here are a few examples that don’t often get as much airtime but are worth considering.

Hospital Administrators and Experts

One such job type exists elsewhere within the healthcare industry. Hospital organization and optimization doesn’t immediately come to mind for most people as a person-centered job – however, these professionals can have profound effects on people’s health and wellbeing. Jobs in this category can be wide-ranging and affect multiple parts of the healthcare landscape.

Healthcare Experts like emergency preparedness administrators audit hospital facilities and processes for weaknesses that would be incapacitated by increased demand or need. They help hospital leadership prepare for worst-case scenarios and bulletproof their operations so that they are capable of dealing with anything unforeseen. Public health professionals and consultants’ study systemic and population-wide health trends and help medical care providers treat and mitigate widespread health problems. And organizational culture specialists can help hospitals institute better internal dynamics and performance to help them better serve their patients.

Each of these roles can have profound impacts on the ways people are cared for in times of great need. Making sure hospitals operate well can have impacts on entire communities and generations.

Government Affairs and Policy Professionals

Politics isn’t the first arena many people think of when imagining careers that are designed to help people. However, a primary purpose of governmental operations is to serve their constituencies and improve the lives, safety, and prospects of those populations. Many professional roles within the areas of government and policy experience hands-on opportunities to shape public experiences for the better.

Especially in areas of local government, many roles can provide the opportunity to work with community members to solve problems and improve quality of life for various constituent groups.

Organizational Consultants and Incentives Officers

A special breed of consultants exist to help organizations fix problems within their processes or cultures. One example is an incentives officer or specialist, which identifies and changes the ways incentives baked into an organization’s operations influence behaviors.

This is an interesting career path that can create profound impacts for large numbers of people by helping organizations become more values-driven, minimize divisive politicking, improve work experience, and sometimes enable organizations to completely overhaul their operations and become much more impactful and healthy.

Organizational consultants of various kinds can make incredible marks on large entities and change the professional experience of countless people throughout their careers.

Professional and Life Coaches

Sport is not the only thing coaches facilitate. Business coaches as well as personal or life coaches provide feedback, insights, and frameworks that allow their clients to grow and reach new potential. This could apply specifically to a particular area or skill set within the professional world, or it could apply more broadly either to personal or to professional skill sets.

Business coaches are often employed to help promising young leaders or those on an executive pathway within corporate settings hone their management and leadership skills. They also can help professionals in specific jobs or industries (for instance, sales professionals or people working within the boutique retail industry) gain or develop the skills they need to remain competitive.

Life coaches sometimes help with overlapping skill sets, but would usually concentrate their expertise or efforts in different areas than business coaches. They might offer relationship coaching, emotional intelligence coaching, or decision coaching to individuals who are struggling to determine the right move in a large career or life decision.

Life coaching can sometimes delve into spiritual or formational practices. It might include things like mindfulness training or contemplation. But however, a life or professional coach might position him or herself, he or she helps clients achieve better work and life outcomes across a broad range of spheres.

Each of the careers listed here can profoundly impact countless lives throughout the course of their professional tenures. They all include ample opportunities to guide, support, strategize, listen, and act in ways that help their beneficiaries and, often, entire communities or more.