What Are the Helping Professions?

Careers in the helping professions cover a wide range, including medicine, nursing, psychological counseling, social work, teaching, school counseling, life coaching, and even ministry. We include medical careers here, even though there can be a huge difference in education, job requirements, and earnings for, say, a neurosurgeon, compared to that of a physical therapist or nurse practitioner. Some might argue that a neurosurgeon is more of a science technology, engineering, and math (STEM) career than a helping profession. It can be, depending on focus, but the drive to enter a career field like that often comes from the same inner calling to help people. If your teen is interested in being a doctor or surgeon, it is worth reading through both this chapter and the STEM career chapter (chapter 4), given the extensive amount of science and math preparation typically required.

The core element of helping professions is that they focus on improving the emotional, intellectual, physical, or spiritual wellness of fellow human beings. Probably the biggest appeal of helping professions is the opportunity to have a tangible and direct impact on the lives of people in need. A teacher can literally watch children's minds grow through their daily lessons. A school counselor can improve the trajectory of a student's entire life just by lending an ear during a crisis. A therapist can help someone finally overcome a mental illness, enough to form friendships or start dating. An oncologist can give more years of life to a mother of four children. A child advocate can rescue children from a dangerous situation and help a family turn itself around.

How many of us in other professions can say that we change lives and improve humanity in such a powerfully direct way? These professionals sound almost like superheroes when you think about what an impact they can have. But anyone working in these professions will tell you that it's not always that simple. They often face monumental challenges from surprising sources, they do not always succeed with everyone they help, and they can feel unappreciated or underpaid for their work. Despite these obstacles, plenty of people get immense personal fulfillment from their role in helping others. Like any other career field, the helping professions have their potential rewards and their potential downsides. We discuss both so that your child will have a better ability, in planning her future education and career pathway, to compare this pathway to others.

Educational Preparation

Although there are exceptions, it is difficult to enter most helping professions without at least a bachelor's degree. For example, all states require a K–12 teacher to hold a bachelor's degree. There are entry-level caretaker positions that do not require a bachelor's degree, but these tend to be hourly positions that require shift work. They start at a pay level not much different from that for retail service jobs and are not likely to provide good benefits. Fields such as social work, child psychology, school counseling, nurse midwifery, family and marriage counseling, speech pathology, special education teaching, occupational therapy, and church ministry all require at least a four-year degree and often a specialized degree or certification for an entry-level career.

Nursing is one profession, in particular, where you can enter the field with an associate degree. If your child is thinking about nursing but isn't sure how far he wants to go in that field, one option could be to complete an associate degree and get some work experience as a licensed practical/vocational nurse or registered nurse (some states may require a bachelor's degree). Then if he enjoys the work and wants to advance, he can go back to school and complete a four-year degree, and potentially a master's degree, to become a more technically trained nurse and increase his earning potential.

Unless students are very certain they want to go straight to medical school or a master's program, it is generally a good idea to get an undergraduate four-year degree with a specialization that will support direct entry into a specific helping profession. A bachelor of social work (BSW) for example, is far more useful in finding a specific entry-level job than a bachelor of psychology, which is much more of a broad survey of the field of psychology and not specific preparation for practical work. A student can still go from earning a bachelor of psychology directly into a master of social work (MSW) degree program, but that presumes she is very confident that she wants to work in the social work field. She also should have had some practical internships and experiences before making that commitment. If your child aspires to be a teacher, typically a state requires that he major in the area in which he intends to teach. It could be wasteful to get a bachelor's degree in sociology if he knows he wants to teach middle school science, because he may then need to pay for additional course work to qualify to teach that subject.

Young people who are interested in attending medical school after they complete their undergraduate degree may believe they must major in a biological science or a premed pathway. Most colleges do not have a specific premed major, and there are plenty of students accepted by medical schools who did not study biology. There are biological science requirements within medical school, of course, and undergraduate biochemistry majors have an easier time with those requirements. However, if they chose to study physics or astronomy instead because they were also interested in those fields, they would likely be able to manage their science requirements in medical school just fine. Remember that medicine is not just about treating physical diseases or medical procedures. It can involve diverse subjects such as medical ethics and psychiatry, or even be focused on areas like mathematical modeling and statistical science. Students with many different educational backgrounds and interests end up in medical school. Regardless of what your child studies, it will be important to have a strong grade point average from her undergraduate course work when applying to medical school. She should be aware of this and prepared to make the commitment to achieving it.

Long-term Career Growth

Within the helping professions, it may be difficult for practitioners to advance their career and increase their earning potential over the long run much without a master's degree or doctorate. Unfortunately, a lot of entry-level and practitioner roles do not support a very high standard of living, at least as a single individual. It is common to get a bachelor's degree, acquire a few years of experience, and then return to school for a master's degree. There is often flexibility here, though, in changing career focus. For example, your child might work as a nurse, then start volunteering to go on pro bono medical missions in a poverty-stricken area, then decide to get a master's degree in public health and begin working for a nonprofit that helps advance legislation related to health care for the poor. For those who want to move into supervisory roles or begin an advanced and more lucrative practice such as clinical psychology, moving past a bachelor's degree is essential.

One other common way of advancing a career is transitioning into private practice as a sole practitioner, part of a group private practice, or ultimately opening your own set of facilities as a founder. This comes with another set of challenges, though, that have little to do with helping people, and a lot to do with running a business. We cover those challenges in chapter 7 on business careers and entrepreneurship, but in general, it means spending much less time helping people directly as a practitioner, which was the original drive for getting into the field. Yet it also may dramatically increase earnings.

My father worked for twenty years practicing, and supervising, within public mental health and substance abuse programs, with a specialized expertise in helping the intellectually disabled. He opened one of the first group homes for the intellectually disabled in the state of Virginia and was the vanguard of a larger movement to transition them out of prisonlike institutions and into smaller homelike environments. He was proud of his work and was paid well enough to provide our family with a solid middle-class lifestyle. By the time he reached middle age, though, he had grown weary of dealing with a board of directors and the constant political battles that come with leadership in public service. He realized that his temperament was better suited to private practice. He then established his own facility for intellectually disabled adults with severe behavioral issues and within five years had opened six group homes and increased his income substantially over his pay as a public supervisor. This was not easy, and it helped to have his experience in public service. Because he had a master's degree and twenty years of experience, and had written books, consulted, and given speeches in his field, opening a private facility was easier than it would have been if he had tried to do it only a few years out of college. That experience was crucial to avoiding many of the perils of private business within helping fields such as intense regulatory scrutiny, sudden rule changes that can immediately hit the bottom line, and potential lawsuits stemming from employee mistakes. Also, it still required business skills like marketing, sales, managing money, hiring, firing, and random things like getting sprinklers installed in an older home. It has at times been a stressful journey for him. Today, however, he can still say that through his work, he helps disabled people live a more dignified life, while also enjoying the financial fruits of his willingness to take risks and work very hard—a true win-win.

Practical Challenges

Working in a helping profession can be highly rewarding, but it is helpful to go in with an awareness of some of the factors that can cause stress and dissatisfaction with these careers. Whether those factors end up affecting your child personally very much depends on his specific circumstances, motivations, and temperament. Let's look at some of the most common sources of frustration.

First, there is a difference between studying something in college and doing it in practice. This is especially true for helping professions because of the deeply personal calling that may have drawn your child to it. In many cases, the challenging reality is that these are jobs in which practitioners deal with human suffering while getting paid on the lower end of the spectrum. This may sound obvious, but we humans are very good at fooling ourselves by thinking only of the positive aspects of something and discounting the negative. This is true especially when we have built dreams of our possible future. Like any of the other career fields we discuss in this book, it really helps for students to find opportunities to try on a career before investing too much.

It's very important to try, as much as possible, to get an inside look at the daily realities of a helping profession before committing to the required education or to an employer. In some of these professions, it can be very tough to find qualified people, like teachers in a poor urban community. Employers will be investing heavily to find, train, and support new employees, so anyone pursuing this path should know something about what to expect. Many helping professions require that practitioners already have some practical experience before applying, so a lot of degree programs build that into their curriculum, but these opportunities may not come until later in any degree program. Maybe your child will not be offered student teaching positions until junior or senior year. Using the techniques we discuss in chapter 10, students can still get more insight into the real-world experience of being a teacher before they are required to fully commit to that degree path.

Another challenge can be the degree to which job prospects, job requirements, and pay are subject to turbulent changes in politics, public policy, or state budgets. Teachers, for example, have had to adjust to major new curriculum policy changes such as the Common Core State Standards, yet in many cases, they have not been given adequate professional development on effective ways to deliver instruction that adheres to the new standards. This change is only one of many new requirements that come and go depending on changes in federal education policies, state education policies, and district leadership. In addition, the teaching profession itself has come under broad criticism from major policy institutes, funding organizations, business leaders, and journalists.

While there is no doubt that some teachers are not effective and teacher training and certification could improve their skills, it has still been demoralizing for truly excellent teachers with years of success to feel painted with the same brush of mediocrity. Some have been blamed for student failures that often have as much to do with deeply rooted structural issues like poverty, school funding, and racism as anything else. When a person's profession comes under that kind of public scrutiny, it can drain their motivation and distract from their core mission of helping students.

Some of these helping professions, such as teaching, are commonly public-sector jobs, which means wages and benefits may be public information and subject to political conditions. It can feel disorienting and invasive to have one's compensation be such a public matter of debate. Being in private practice doesn't guarantee freedom from these challenges either. Public policy changes can just as easily hit entrepreneurs in the helping professions.

My father's business is highly dependent on Medicaid funding to cover the cost of housing, feeding, medicating, and supervising the intellectually disabled adults in his group homes. Yet he is frequently subject to unexpected changes in how much Medicaid funding will be provided per person, what types of services must be provided in exchange for that, what type of documentation is required, how many staff members must be present in certain situations, and how many individuals may reside in a facility.

Imagine if you ran a restaurant and city officials could come in at any time and tell you that they are changing half of the rules that govern how you run your business, affecting who you hire and how much money you make. In addition, you will be fined or shut down if you do not comply quickly. Many of these rules are there for good reasons (like ensuring safety or preventing abuse), and many of these changes are made because of unsustainable cost increases or better guidelines for care. But when your business is required to spend $100,000 to comply with new regulations, will you have it in the bank? The state legislature and regulatory agencies will not be able to bend the rules just for you.

Emotional Risks

One of the most profound challenges of helping others is the emotional weight of it. Nurses and doctors may deal with sickness and death every day. Social workers will see the myriad ways in which people suffer from mental illness. Child services case workers see the most vulnerable members of our society treated in horrifying ways. Teachers endure stressed-out parents struggling to manage their children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or learning differences. Alcohol rehabilitation counselors work with good people who have unwittingly destroyed an entire family.

In addition to the suffering that your child, as a practitioner in these fields, may observe in others they are trying to help, they may have to grapple with the fact that they do not always successfully end that suffering when given the opportunity. Not every therapy patient learns to manage a mental illness, not every student graduates, and not every alcoholic maintains sobriety after treatment. Sometimes the reasons for this are the people around that person whom helping professionals cannot control, such as an abusive parent, a dysfunctional spouse, an administrator playing politics, or a criminal justice system with endemic racism. That may seem like an obvious part of the job to your child, but if he is seriously considering a helping profession, it's likely because he is naturally empathetic to others. Yet this empathy can turn on him if he does not learn to manage his own reactions to the suffering around him.

It's important for people in the helping professions to care for themselves as well. Often they will be in roles where it feels that their own needs must come last. A minister providing pastoral counseling to a dying member of her congregation at 2:00 a.m. may wonder, “What else could be more important than this?” A teacher in a striving inner-city middle school may get text messages at 9:00 p.m. from a student desperate for help with a reading assignment and wonder how she is going to bring these kids up from a third-grade to an eighth-grade reading level. A conscientious emergency room doctor may feel compelled to stay even after a long shift to check on a patient who really worries her. The inability to set personal boundaries and take care of one's own needs will lead to burnout, a phenomenon that is common in the helping professions. A social worker, teacher or nurse will have family members and friends who need time from them too, and those special bonds are what ultimately sustain all of us.

We should make a special note here regarding medicine. Not only can the daily practice of medicine require a lot of time and energy from someone (depending on the field), but training can take many years. During those years, it may be challenging for your child to get married and have children if that is his goal. Recent regulatory changes now allow medical residents to work twenty-four-hour shifts. Obviously anyone working a lot of those long and tiring shifts is not spending much time with a significant other or a child or even pursuing a hobby.

For almost all the helping careers that potentially expose practitioners to burnout, there are well-established ways to move into less emotionally or physically taxing parts of the field. We do not mean to imply that everyone is headed for a burnout experience. An option is to move into supervision or management, although this typically requires going beyond a bachelor's degree to get a master's degree or PhD, and this work doesn't suit everyone's temperament. But there are other pathways besides management. For example, a nurse could move from a stressful job in a hospital with irregular shift work to a 9-to-5 nursing position with a private rehabilitation facility. In this position, she might be on call less frequently and have vacation and sick leave similar to someone working at a more traditional job.

A related trap that sometimes befalls professional helpers is bringing their own suffering to work. As we noted, many people come into a helping career because they experienced trauma or witnessed suffering. It's important that those individuals ensure they get the kind of therapy or counseling they need to address their own experiences, or they can find themselves approaching their work in unhealthy ways. Even years into professional practice, proper supervision and case consultation are critical in order to maintain balance and manage the potential emotions that can be transferred between a practitioner and a patient. If your child feels a deep calling to this world because of some trauma, discuss with her whether her need to help others might also be addressed by getting help for herself to ensure she is not trying to use her career as personal therapy. Anyone going into a helping profession should have clear boundaries between the satisfaction of doing the work and the need for her own treatment or personal care.

It is also essential to adhere closely to the boundaries and code of ethics established for your chosen profession. Many fields have some standard code of ethics, but this can be uniquely challenging for people in helping careers because they are involved in such deeply human and personal situations. Often it is the person who is trying the hardest to help someone else who steps over a boundary, not the stereotype of some predator we might imagine trying to take advantage of them (though this does happen). If your child does informational interviewing or job shadowing as we recommend in chapter 11, he should inquire about the kinds of boundaries and ethical codes that are important in his field of interest to gain a better sense of whether he can manage them.

Finally, most of these professions require continuing education. Teachers, therapists, counselors, doctors, and many others need to return to the classroom every so often to stay up-to-date with the latest research and best practices in their field. That doesn't always mean sitting in a classroom with a professor. Often it can be workshops and conferences that are provided by industry groups and consultants. This demonstrates a commitment to lifelong learning as part of the profession. For some, this can be an appealing part of the job. Some fields of medicine are evolving rapidly, and exciting research is coming out all the time that could potentially save more lives. It can be fun to be on the cutting edge and keep from getting bored by always learning something new. For others, though, this could be a source of frustration, especially if your child has learning differences and struggles with school. That doesn't mean it is not worth overcoming to achieve goals, but it's something to think about if he is exploring a helping profession and trying to better understand his potential career experiences.

We hope this chapter has given you and your child a lot to discuss. Both of us have been deeply touched by people in the helping professions who have cared for our parents, our friends, and our children. There are doctors who gave people we love extra life and precious extra time with them. There are teachers who believed in us and challenged us to be better than we realized we could be. We owe a great debt to them, and you should be proud of your child for wanting to walk in their footsteps. Maybe this book will help you give her that extra nudge, or food for thought to overcome her doubts, and make the world a better place.

Sample Earnings Outlook

Following is a sample of 2015 median annual earnings for various jobs in the helping professions according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Home health aide: $21,920
• Physical therapist: $84,020
• Registered nurse: $64,790
• Emergency medical technician/paramedic: $31,980
• Physician/surgeon: $187,200
• Dentist: $158,310
• Nutritionist: $57,910
• High school teacher: $57,200
• Preschool teacher: $28,570
• Social worker: $45,900
• Rehabilitation counselor: $34,390

For wage information on other careers in the field not listed here and for more detailed local wage information or job prospects, we recommend using the online Occupational Outlook Handbook provided free by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/home.htm

Keep in mind that we are showing median pay, so some people in these roles may earn substantially less and others may earn substantially more. Generally pay is higher in locations where the cost of living is higher and in fields that are growing more rapidly or require more specialization and experience. In addition to using the Occupational Outlook Handbook website, we recommend that your child conduct an Internet search using terms like “future job prospects for [career name]” to get the most current outlook on industry growth potential.