Millennials are the next great generation beginning their careers, but potential employers do not always have an easy time appealing to them. UpWork reports that while millennials are set to be the most employed generation in the American workforce starting this year, 53 percent of hiring managers express difficulty finding and retaining them. For millennials looking for unconventional work as well as employers trying to understand what appeals to this generation of potential employees, here’s a look at five unconventional jobs for millennials and why they are a great fit.
Adventure Trip Leader
Millennials have grown up with the entire world at their fingertips, able to see and talk to people from far away countries from the moment that they could handle a laptop. Adventure trip leaders are the people who organize, interpret, and lead adventurous tourists in exotic international or domestic vacations. Some trip leaders deal with exciting physical activities like bungee jumping, kayaking and base jumping, whereas others organize leisurely bike rides through wine country. Millennials love to travel – in fact, ad agency Barkley reports that 75 percent of millennials say that they would like to travel abroad as much as possible, and 70 percent want to see every continent. Jobs that offer this sort of travel experience are sure to attract many millennials into their ranks.
Data Scientist
We live in a time when even our refrigerator might be tracking our habits, and all this data needs to be scoured and analyzed by someone. Data scientists are the people who deal with “big data,” helping companies make sense of huge amounts of information to guide marketing, manufacturing, engineering and other industries to better returns. Millennials are entrepreneurial as a generation and like to be involved in many aspects of a business, and data scientists are part analyst, part adviser and part tech guru with a dash of hacker thrown in. It is an appealing job that rewards creativity and experimentation.
Manufacturing Worker
Many manufacturing companies are experiencing a continued drop in staff numbers as baby boomers retire out of the manufacturing industry. The next generation of manufacturing workers just isn’t applying for the jobs, saddled with the misconception that manufacturing is thankless and tedious. This couldn’t be further from the truth – Apple Rubber points out that the average manufacturing employee makes upwards of $77,000 a year in addition to benefits, but despite this only 5.4 percent of the 80 million millennials in the job market work in manufacturing. This is a brand perception issue – most unskilled manufacturing labor is now outsourced overseas and most factory jobs deal with automation and programming. Getting millennials into factories requires that manufacturers change this perception.
Social Media Manager
Many millennials have grown up with social media as a ubiquitous part of their everyday experience, so it should come as no surprise that this relatively new career path is so perfectly suited for them. In many ways, millennial employees have been engaging in brand management on a personal level since the birth of social media. Millennials have a different outlook on much of modern technology and social systems, and a job that applies this experience and knowledge is always going to be appealing to them.
Beer Cicerone
The beer equivalent of a wine sommelier, the rise of craft beer culture has made this a certification not to be taken lightly. The Cicerone certification system was developed in 2007 by the president of the Craft Beer Institute, Ray Daniels, in response to the growing popularity of craft beer. The growing need for educated servers and brewmasters has driven many restaurants and breweries to encourage and even pay employees to pursue this certification. This is perhaps one of the best things employers could learn from those businesses regarding their millennial employees — continued education and knowledge are powerful incentives for millennials, and helping them to find that through your organization can create loyal and dedicated employees.
