9781422276686

• Do you like babies and toddlers? Do you find little kids irresistible? Then check out Chapter 4, which is on nannies, babysitters, and day care assistants. If you go into this field, you’ll spend your workdays taking care of little tykes, from the tiniest newborns to kids nearly ready for kindergarten. If you work as a nanny or babysitter, you may also work with older kids after school, on weekends, and during vacations. You’ll change diapers, sing lullabies, serve snacks, and clean up spills. You’ll need endless patience, but your reward will be lots of little hugs and smiles. Chapter 5 is about preschool aides and school aides. If you like working with kids but like them a bit older than babies and toddlers, you might enjoy this field. Schools of all levels need aides and assistants to help the main teachers with their daily work. As an aide you may greet kids in the morning, prepare materials for them to use in class, help them get lunch, and watch them at recess. This is a great field for anyone who wants to make a real difference in a child’s life. This career is also a good stepping-stone for those who might want to become a teacher later on. Are you a clean freak? Do you like to make a house neat and tidy? Chapter 6 would interest you—it’s about housekeepers, maids, janitors, and other cleaners. You could work for a hotel, a hospital, or a school, or you could clean houses. This field is very easy to enter; you won’t need any extra training as long as you’re enthusiastic, strong, and can do the work. You may never have considered a career as a funeral attendant, but you might after read- ing Chapter 7. People die every day, so there’s a steady need for funeral workers. Funeral attendants do all kinds of jobs, from polishing limousines to collecting dead bodies from the morgue. You’ll have to be neat, polite, and punctual—and be interested, rather than turned off, by human biology and the idea of dead bodies—if you want to succeed in this field. Funeral attendants insist that their job isn’t at all grim or ghoulish. Funeral attendant Randy Clark says when he is helping to embalm a dead body, “I always like to think of the person being some- one I love and care about.” He adds that showing proper respect and care for the bereaved is another meaningful part of his job. If you know how to sew and like it, you should consider a career as a seamstress, tailor, or upholsterer, discussed in Chapter 8. In these jobs you would measure people or furniture and cut and sew cloth to fit them precisely. All sewing careers are fairly difficult, and it takes several years to master these trades. But if you know the basics and are willing to learn, you can get a job doing simple sewing and gradually work your way up to a master craftsperson. Most of these fields are not hard to enter, though many of them take years to master. Many of these jobs are deeply satisfying to their practitioners. Personal service jobs offer the Introduction 9