What are the Weirdest Jobs?

Key Takeaways:

Meteorologist Tops the List as the World's Weirdest Job: Meteorologist and Military Family Counselor are the most distinct occupations in our data.
The Weirdest Jobs Pay Less: Average salary declines steadily as occupational uniqueness increases.
Inheritance Tax Planning and Psychometrics Are the Weirdest Skills: These rank among the most distinct skills in our data, alongside specialties as varied as waxing and security architecture design.
Unique Skills Pay a Premium, Unlike Unique Jobs: Unlike occupations, the most unique skills carry a salary premium, meaning pay rises, rather than falls, as skill uniqueness increases.

What makes a job "weird"? Not necessarily an obscure title you've never heard of. In fact, some of the weirdest jobs in our data are perfectly familiar occupations whose day-to-day mix of tasks simply doesn't resemble any other job in the labor market. In order to make workforce comparisons, we need to create categories of similar jobs and skills. It's useful to know that "Lawyer" & "Attorney" are similar job titles and "SQL" & "Databases" are similar skills so that we can better categorize them. But what about understanding which jobs or skills are the most different from each other? Presumably, there would be some compensation benefits to one's job or skill uniqueness?

How We Measure Job "Weirdness"

Fundamentally, a job is a bundle of activities or tasks. And a skill is an input into completing those same activities. Using this structure, we find text that describes the activity content of jobs and skills, and use that text to represent each in a mathematical space. Reducing the dimensionality of the space and using a distance metric, we can determine which occupations are further away from other occupations, and which ones are the closest to others.

The Weirdest Jobs in the World, According to the Data

Below are the five most unique and the five least unique occupations according to this labor market data analytics tool leveraging Revelio Labs data:

If you would like to learn more about our occupation landscape, here is a plot showing the top 10k job titles. (In addition, if you would like to learn more about Revelio Labs' job taxonomy and skills taxonomy, please feel free to reach out.)

Do the Weirdest Jobs Pay More — Or Less?

But what does it mean to have a unique occupation? The composition of activities performed in that occupation is unlike anything else in the labor market. In other words, there is little demand for them. Therefore, when we compare occupational uniqueness and salaries, we find that more unique occupations pay a lower salary.

The Weirdest Skills And Why They Pay More

What about skills, which are the inputs to completing the activities in occupations? Here are the five most unique and least unique skills according to our data analytics tool:

Unlike occupations, unique skills have a salary premium for specialization. Since unique skills are unlikely to be transferable, individuals holding them receive higher salaries to offset the risk of no longer needing their unique skill.

In the end, it pays to be ordinary in your job title but extraordinary in your skill set.