Having the right qualifications, certifications and experience will consistently land you high income jobs, irrespective of economic recessions, depressions and other difficulties outside your control. Businesses are looking for people who will help them solve their problems, increase their revenue, lower their costs and are willing to pay a significant salary to those who can help them achieve these goals. The challenge, significantly enough, is in understanding one's own areas of expertise, identifying gaps and areas of needed improvement, and having the motivation to consistently work to fill those gaps.

An income of $100,000 today is not the same as it was 25 years ago, but it sure beats a salary of $50,000, and importantly, is a lot more accessible in a variety of professions. The truly high income in today's marketplace is $300,000 or higher, which is achievable in select professions or by contributions at a very high level to your company. Of course we are not talking about high-level executive compensations in large multi-national corporations or income that is possible through a highly successful start-up, which run north of $1 million/year.

The Orthodox Approach to High Income Jobs

The traditional or orthodox approach to high income jobs is by focusing your attention and effort on select skills that are in high demand in the marketplace, and then to build suitable experience in that space to slowly increase your marketability and value delivered to your company. Your compensation will rise steadily and in sync. with your rising value.

An example of this might be a path of a technical leader in IT who develops skills in select programming languages, select Enterprise Resource Planning applications, and in the overall area of IT architecture and then builds experience in those areas - slowly and steadily delivering increasing value in shorter time frames. A typical IT professional after Bachelor's degree may earn around $40-50K/year in his first year, but can go on to earn a salary in the $100-$150K/year range after a decade of experience, without going into management or any other line.

The above path holds true for a number of other professions, including physician's assistant, accountant at a company, project management, product management, air hostess, long-haul truck drivers and many more. The upper cap for each of these professions varies a bit, but as your experience and value delivered grows, compensation keeps pace and stays just ahead of inflation.

After developing suitable skills, you need to look at companies that need those skills - and this can be done through

• Personal contacts
• Applying to companies based on job postings on their website
• Browsing and applying to job postings online
• Posting your own resume on job websites
• Maintaining your electronic portfolio of accomplishments for others to find

Most of these methods are designed to function as a bottom-up approach as the focus is on finding companies that can leverage your skills. The competition is with others with similar skills and you compete on knowledge, skills, experience and lastly on expected compensation. Typically, companies that can get immediate value out of you will readily pay you the salary you desire, within the band of salary that is appropriate for that position.

Maximizing Income through Orthodox Approach to High Income Jobs

Even if following the traditional approach to a job search, it is useful to focus on a select set of industries to limit your search to. For example, if you are in IT or accountancy, it is still very useful to pick your favorite areas of work to narrow down your search. This focus then permits you to understand the dynamics of that industry and to fundamentally understand the value that your skills can actually deliver.

As a simple example, consider an IT job in a company that manufactures gas pumps. Clearly, the money maker for the company is the manufacturing of the pumps themselves. The small role of IT is in the area of user interface that pump users interact with (accepting credit cards, offering selection of fuel and so on). IT, in this case, will be seen as a value-add or even differentiator, but will not get significant investment from the company. You can have a reasonable career in IT in such a company, but not a spectacular one.

Compare the above with an IT job at an online discount broker, where IT is far more critical to the operations of the company - as the order taking, routing and fulfillment are all handled electronically. Other areas such as customer relationship management are also handled through IT. Clearly, the direction set by IT is critical to the future of the company, and is a place where the value delivered by IT is invaluable. The role of the CIO or IT programmer is significantly more influential, gives you the opportunity to grow from a career perspective and allows you to earn a significantly higher salary.

On the other hand, if your profession is of such a nature that it is applicable only to one industry and companies in that industry, your choices are automatically narrowed. In this situation, to maximize your earning potential, it is doubly important to understand the business your company is in, and to understand the overall business environment that your company is operating in. Offering solutions to problems that your company is facing through application of your skills in your particular area would be highly appreciated. For an accountant, it may be a way to get low cost financing for your company, or suggesting solutions to financing problems the company's clients might be facing and ways around it.

The more value your skills deliver to your company, the higher your income and responsibilities in that firm. However, distinguish carefully between jobs that are viewed as "necessary evil" and those that are "value drivers". You do not want to be in jobs that are merely demand satisfiers - instead you want jobs that can create the innovation the company seeks to differentiate itself.

The unorthodox approach to finding high income jobs is the subject of a separate article at this site.