Personal Care and Service: Schools and Careers

Personal Care And Service - Career Information

Personal Care and Service Career Overview

Personal care and service careers cover a diverse and widely-ranging variety of professions. Job descriptions vary widely, as do educational requirements. The common denominator for those who enter careers in this field is a strong interest in providing a service to another person, usually on a one-on-one interactive basis. The job categorizations in this highly diverse area can be roughly grouped into four general areas: Personal grooming (cosmetologists, barbers, hairdressers), personal fitness (massage therapists, physical therapists), entertainment/travel (travel agents, transportation workers), and personal assistance (housekeepers, child care workers, personal chefs).

Personal grooming professionals focus on providing hair and/or skin care services to enhance the appearance of consumers. Jobs in this category include barbers, cosmetologists, hairdressers, manicurists, pedicurists, makeup artists, and skin care specialists. Personal fitness workers help people feel better by relieving pain, improving mobility, alleviating stress, and/or helping heal injuries. Entertainment/travel professionals assist clients in planning or facilitating their vacations or recreational activities. Personal assistants help busy individuals with household and personal errands.

Personal Care and Service Career Education

Most states require that barbers and cosmetologists complete a program in a state-licensed barber or cosmetology school. Full-time programs in barbering and cosmetology, which usually last nine months, can be found in postsecondary vocational schools and often lead to an associate degree. The same types of schools offer training programs for manicurists, pedicurists, and skin care specialists which require significantly less time. Training requirements for massage therapists vary widely by state and locality but most often a training program from a massage therapy school or college is a necessity. A physical therapist, on the other hand, needs at least a bachelor's degree, although a master's degree is highly preferable. Degree programs in physical therapy are offered at an increasingly large number of schools.

Most professions in the entertainment/travel industry do not carry stringent requirements in terms of formal education, although some colleges now offer bachelor�s or master�s degrees in travel and tourism. Some of the larger travel agencies require their agents to have a college degree of some type in liberal arts or business. Travel agent courses are also offered in public adult education programs, online, and in community colleges. The training and qualifications required of personal assistants vary widely. Highly specialized assistants (such as personal chefs) usually require a diploma from a specialty (e.g., culinary) program. Housekeepers usually do not need a degree or diploma; however, child care workers usually do, with the specific requirements varying by state. These requirements range from a high school diploma to a college degree in child development or early childhood education. State requirements are generally more demanding for workers at child care centers than for family child care providers. Child care workers in private settings who care for only a few children often are not regulated at all.

Schools for Personal Care And Service are listed in the column to the left.

Careers and Salary Data

This table shows summary data on occupations in the US. Clicking on any occupation name brings you to a page showing job prospects and salaries for that occupation in hundreds of metro areas across the country, with data updated through 2008.(Where data is denoted by an asterisk (*), summary info was not available.

The green bars in the table below indicate the relative salary levels and growth rates of each occupation, compared to the others. The levels are determined by sorting the occupations (by salary or growth rate, separately) and then dividing them into ten groups corresponding to the the ten possible green bar levels. So a single bar means the occupation is in the bottom 10% for that characteristic compared to others on this page.

Click each Occupation title for more details.