The Best Career Opportunities, "College Degree Not Required"
(high-paying jobs, with job growth, not necessarily requiring a degree)

If you're loaded up with MBAs and engineering degrees, it's usually pretty easy to get a high-paying job. But most people aren't in that category. So we've analyzed pretty much all of the government-defined career categories to see if we can find good careers for the rest of us (not that we have anything against college degrees or career education).

The list below weighs hundreds of careers, looking for those which combine decent salary, a good job growth rate, and a relatively low requirement for a four year college degree (what we called here "college degree not required"). The jobs at the top of the list are good bets, while those near the bottom of the list don't fit the bill.

Of course not all of the careers listed here are among the highest-paying jobs, and some of them do in fact require degrees (see the number in the fifth column for the percentage of recent job holders that have degrees). But we've tilted the table to make the most promising ones tend to rise toward the top, to help you with your career search.

Note: Clicking on any of the careers names will bring you to a page with a map and table showing where those jobs are relatively most common.