Comparing America’s Top Jobs With Those Abroad

We stack this country’s best paid positions against the top careers in other English-speaking countries.

Quick, which profession boasts the highest salaries in our country? You probably said “health care”, which is 100 percent correct - America’s doctors are some of the top wage earners in this nation. That’s not the case in many other parts of the world, though, since several other countries have some form of socialized medical coverage for their citizens.

A top jobs list crowded with health care professionals, as in our case, is the exception rather than the rule. This is particularly true of many of our fellow English-speaking nations. In the U.K., for example, only two of the highest-salaried careers have anything to do with medicine. The first is the general category of “medical practitioner”, which holds the number two position with a median salary in 2011 of just under 83,000 British pounds, or $130,515. Dentists occupy the number five slot, at around 60,000 British pounds ($94,348)

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Ambitious Brits who want to take home the meatiest paycheck possible should put on their business suits and work their way up the white-collar ladder. The number one top job category in the country is “head of major organization”, with a median annual salary of GBP114,549, or around $180,124, in 2011. And those paychecks have been getting fatter in a hurry; that figure was 15 percent higher than that of 2010.

The top 10 jobs list for our neighbor to the north can be described as a blend of its American and British counterparts. According to Statistics Canada, quoted by MSN Money, the highest paid profession in the nation is in the medical field. Specialist physicians in “The Great White North” take home an average salary of CA$179,514 ($178,817). The number two job is judge (CA$178,053, or $177,361). Rounding out the top three is senior manager of financial, communications and other business services. That’s a mouthful of a job category but it’s a wallet full of cash – CA$162,376 ($161,745) annually, to be exact.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the situation turns nearly upside-down. In Australia, the hottest and best paid jobs these days are in blue-collar industries. According to an annual survey by that country’s financial services firm Suncorp, mining pays the best out of all industries. This is because Australia is rich in natural resources, so from time to time it experiences a boom in the industry – like now, for instance. Mining might not be a glamorous industry but Down Under it’s a relatively lucrative one, paying annual wages of AU$112,991 ($118,285). Number two is another blue collar sector, utilities, while healthcare and social services is a lowly number 13, with yearly take-home of only around AU$46,696, or $48,884.

The disparity between countries speaking the same language and having similar habits is striking. It seems that these nations aren’t as alike as they seem to be – at least as far as their job cultures are concerned.