The “it” occupations for 2008. By Stephanie Roy, Sonia Boonchanasukit and Gregoire Glachant, illustrations by Varalee Bunnag

What do fourth-year university students, managers facing a mid-life crisis (at age 28), disgruntled employees and creative minds with unused potential have in common? They’re probably all job hunting, figuring out what they want to do with their lives or thinking about a career switch. Here are some of the hottest jobs out there—let them be your inspiration.

It’s All About You

When making decisions gets too 1. Confusing, 2. Demanding and 3. Time consuming—you hire someone to make them for you.

The ultimate style of dependence is in the form of a life coach. You could turn from stranger to best friend by the end of a couple of review sessions. A life coach does everything from telling someone how to dress to counseling them on relationship issues. It’s personal—even if you’re dealing with not very personal things like the person’s career. For a better understanding of what the job entails, join one of the Coach for Goal seminars by visiting www.coachforgoal.com.

However, if you’re looking for something a little less wholesome and a bit more specific, then you might want to consider these options. If you’re the person everyone counts on for relationship advice, then you might do well as a matchmaker. If you read BK’s recent relationships issue (May 23), you’ll know just how many people are already in the field of matchmaking—offering relationship counseling and introduction services just in Bangkok alone. Judging by how busy working professionals are these days, you’ll be tied up trying to hook people up all year round. If you’re any good.

If relationships aren’t really your cup of tea then you also have the choice of becoming someone’s personal shopper/stylist. Remember the good ole days where you had to go to three different people to get one perfect look? Not anymore! A personal stylist’s job is about the entire picture—from head to toe. Every big mall (Siam Paragon, Central, Emporium) has one. If everyone turns to you for fashion advice, you might want to give this job a shot.

Finally, if you just want to focus in on health but the thought of becoming another personal trainer at a crowded gym doesn’t appeal, then you might want to consider role of the corporate fitness trainer. It’s all about bringing the blessed boot camp to busy work places! (See Corporate Fitness, this page.) It’ll make you proud to know that the guys already in it were able to increase NASA’s productivity by 12%! Like they say, a healthy worker is a happy worker!

Go Global

A strong trend in the modern workplace is for employers to look for staff that are increasingly inter. Even being bilingual isn’t enough, these days. With all the merging and collaborating being done between East and West, there’s a constant increase in demand for people who are 1. able to work in sync with different cultures, 2. linguistically gifted and 3. willing to pack their bags and travel the world every week or so. If you’re really good at all this, you could be a trans-cultural interfacer. Educate that American guy on how to work with us strange Thai people through workshops, seminars and one-on-one coaching.

Green Collars

You’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth—Planet Earth has officially given us an ultimatum and the response is creating a new breed of worker: the green collared worker.

Although this has yet to pick up in Thailand according to the popular job website managers we consulted, the trend is obvious in Europe and the US. You can choose to be behind the scenes as an environmental consultant; the job involves lots of research, like site investigations and assessments, to eventually come up with solutions on how to turn a not-so-eco-friendly site into one that is doing less harm to the environment. If you want more of a front-line job, then a carbon trader is certainly a growing trend within the green collar industry. Here, you deal with carbon credits—a scheme that is being used globally to reduce CO2 emissions by “capping total annual emissions and letting the market assign a monetary value to any shortfall through trading,” say our friends at Wikipedia.org. These credits are then exchanged, bought and sold between companies and are also used to help finance greenhouse gas reduction schemes around the world.

Work in Bed

Today, working at home is mostly equated with freelancing. But the new trend is for companies to encourage their employees to stay away from the workplace rather than clock in long hours. You’re not dreaming. Last week, a Finance Ministry official anonymously quoted in The Nation spoke of his ministry’s desire to develop a program for his employees to work at the office only four days a week and do a fifth day wherever they please. At the Bank of Thailand, the policy is already in place (and judged a success) and a Total Access Communication’s executive was quoted as saying that his corporation was going to equip employees with headsets, computers, and high-speed connections at home to follow this growing trend.

The rationale behind working at home is to save on transportation costs (for the employees) and office expenses for the employer (smaller offices, lower utility bills). But according to Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It’s authors Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the benefits of a flexible schedule are much greater than reduced bills. While working at Best Buy (an American consumer electronics chain) they developed a “results-oriented work environment” (ROWE), which does not make attending meetings compulsory or implement any working hours. Employees were assessed exclusively on their performance, and the results were a reduced turnover for those employees Best Buy wanted to keep.

Whether you’re going to work at home for a company or as a freelancer, writing seems to be one of the top jobs to fit the bill (whether technical, commercial writer or translator), followed by graphic design and, more interestingly, training. It seems e-learning will need its share of e-trainers nonetheless. As an online tutor, you could work in any field: medical, accounting…whatever you’re good at.