10 sexy jobs

By Candace Corner
CareerBuilder.com

(CareerBuilder.com) — Money, power, fame and glamour are just some of the elements that take a career choice from tedious to tantalizing, but there’s a little more to it than that.

In the same way that physical beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the definition of what qualifies as a “sexy” is a matter of what you find most attractive about a job’s responsibilities.

Firefighters are sexy because their role requires bravery, and doctors have sexy jobs because they have commitment and credentials. Danger and intrigue can also factor in to what we find alluring.

If there’s one other thing sexy jobs share with the perceptions of physical beauty, it’s that society, for the most part, creates a general guideline for what makes a job hot. We find interest in the rich and famous and the jobs that seem to have the best perks.

Here are some examples of jobs that sizzle:

1. Showgirl

Why it’s sexy: Their job involves performing dances in elaborate, revealing costumes onstage.

Where you’ll find them: For the most part, it’s Vegas, baby. They’re onstage, in the dressing room or working out.

The pros: They’re in the spotlight, in peak shape, and always look amazing.

The cons: It’s harder than it looks, and involves constant exercise and a lot of practicing. Costume headpieces are heavy and people often confuse showgirls with being part of the sex industry.

2. Couture salespeople

Why it’s sexy: The rich and famous often shop high-end. The right store and location means there is a likely chance of working with A-list celebrities and other beautiful people.

Where you’ll find them: Mostly in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Milan, but basically anywhere where wearing the latest trend is more important than the price tag.

The pros: It opens up opportunities for meeting the right people to launch a future position in fashion or as a personal assistant. And you can’t beat the employee discount.

The cons: Retail is still retail, so expect to continue folding sweaters, re-organizing racks and assisting crabby customers.

3. Fashion journalist

Why it’s sexy: These people know the industry inside and out, attend all of the fashion shows and schmooze with designers and other influential people.

Where you’ll find them: In the press seats by the runway and on location for interviews. While it’s not mandatory, there are more people working in the major fashion capitals.

The pros: Amazing samples and the opportunity to meet some of the biggest names in the business.

The cons: Finding work can be difficult. Writing reviews in this industry means a lot of working hours and dealing with city expenses and difficult people.

4. Runway model

Why it’s sexy: They showcase the latest fashion and their job is to be beautiful.

Where you’ll find them: On the runway and at fashion shoots, largely at the fashion capitals, but also anywhere there are designers looking to show the public their newest creations.

The pros: They have a reputation for being hot and they get paid for it.

The cons: Competition is fierce. The model look that’s in-demand at the moment may not be what designers are looking for next season.

5. Hotel concierge

Why it’s sexy: They’re smooth operators and know all the right people and places in the area.

Where you’ll find them: At upscale hotel locations and around the grounds making sure everyone’s happy.

The pros: Area businesses are more likely to treat you right, since you recommend new business.

The cons: Long hours and the not-so-glamorous duty of dealing regularly with difficult personalities.

6. Makeup artist

Why it’s sexy: They transform and enhance people’s looks to be their best or most interesting.

Where you’ll find them: At counters, on film sets, in dressing rooms and anyplace else where someone is going to be televised, photographed or doing a big appearance.

The pros: There is an amazing chance for advancement from counter rep to launching a signature beauty line or garnering celeb clientele once a reputation is established.

The cons: A client with a good experience will say a lot, but so will those with bad experiences. Word-of-mouth creates the biggest buzz, so this could work against a makeup artist.

7. Stunt double

Why it’s sexy: Stunt men and women defeat the odds while they leaping off buildings, cruising through fires and conquering car crashes. The thrill and the danger create a high.

Where you’ll find them: Somewhere dangerous or somewhere relatively safe and doing something dangerous.

The pros: They get the reputation of surviving some of the most death-defying acts humanly possible.

The cons: Stunts don’t always get the recognition they deserve in the public eye.

8. Magazine photographer

Why it’s sexy: They are paid to capture images of beautiful and interesting people and locations.

Where you’ll find them: At photo shoots and in dark rooms. The majority of the work is in New York and Los Angeles.

The pros: Their creative vision pays off, literally.

The cons: Expensive and heavy equipment, finding the right frame and needing to talk your subjects into your ideas.

9.Club owner

Why it’s sexy: They are their own bosses and they create the atmosphere where people go to party.

Where you’ll find them: Working the room and overseeing the scene.

The pros: As the owners of the area hotspots, everyone wants to know them. Reputation makes the business.

The cons: Trends come and go, and if club owners can’t keep it interesting, patrons will party elsewhere.

10.Professional investigator

Why it’s sexy: Their job is all about uncovering confidential information, whether it’s insurance fraud or cheating spouses.

Where you’ll find them: Doing research, testifying in court or on location for surveillance.

The pros: Uncovering infidelities and getting justice for the romantically wronged is their bread and butter.

The cons: Serving subpoenas and other court-related work is the unglamorous side of their business. The work can also be sometimes perceived as seedy by the general public.

The Talent Behind ‘China Inc.’

By Thomas Hout and John Wong

From The Wall Street Journal Online

A stereotype is forming around China’s acquisitions in the U.S. — buy fast rather than build slow. Lenovo’s buyout of IBM’s PC unit, TCL’s buyout of France’s Thomson and with it RCA, and now Haier’s bid for Maytag all suggest that China is in a hurry to go global and will freely spend low-cost money to acquire our brands and distribution access, plus secure an outlet for their low-cost products made in China.

The problem with this view is that China’s most successful acquisitions to date in the U.S. have little to do with China’s low-cost money and workers or buying our brands. They are instead all about Chinese management skill and U.S. workers. These no-name Chinese acquisitions are turn-arounds founded on hard-nosed Chinese business practices, and they import less product from China than most U.S. manufacturers do.

Haier in fact doesn’t fit the mold either. It has spent 10 years building its own brand in the U.S. and now has its name on 10% of new U.S. refrigerator sales. Large units, too expensive to ship from China, are made in the U.S. Haier succeeded by partnering with a young, market-savvy U.S. entrepreneur, Michael Jemal, who created down-market, niche refrigerator products that the big U.S. brands ignored and won its own distribution access by customizing products for the big box retailers. Haier’s bid for Maytag is a turn-around play premised on Haier’s proven management practices. Otherwise, sophisticated co-investors like Blackstone and Bain Capital would not be aboard.

Chinese companies that are successfully building slow in the U.S. include Wanxiang and China International Marine Container (CIMC). Wanxiang Group, China’s leading auto-parts maker, tried to export auto parts from China to the U.S. but found itself under-priced by Polish and Romanian imports. So it adopted a private equity role in building a U.S. business: it joint ventures or acquires stakes in struggling U.S. manufacturers, then restructures their management and operations based on what Wanxiang learned in China. The Group now has equity positions in over 30 auto-parts companies world-wide, and its U.S. sales of nearly $400 million are more profitable than its business back home.

CIMC may be the world’s least visible globally dominant company, making 40% of all shipping containers. In the 1990s it consolidated South China’s big container business — much like GM rolled-up U.S. autos in the 1930s — by buying up smaller local producers with non-voting stock, then rationalized production among these subsidiaries. Only then did CIMC acquire a U.S. truck-trailer maker from a bankrupt parent and turn it around, using Chinese-made container components and factory floor technology.

Chinese management is an under-rated asset in American discussions of China’s global strategy. Almost all large successful companies in China are turn-arounds of formerly politically managed state-owned enterprises. The managers who took them over during the 1980s and 1990s reforms had to learn what any turn-around specialist does — flatten layers, fire the pretenders, prune losing businesses, and hammer operating costs down. The CEOs of Haier, Wanxiang, and CIMC all started and spent their careers on the factory floor. China’s low-cost mentality is just as much about cheap management as about cheap labor.

So it makes sense that China’s first and surest global companies will be in mid-tech or modest brand businesses built on ground-level operating skills, opportunism, and local partnerships — not high-profile consumer brands or high tech. These proven Chinese strengths also play perfectly to deep changes going on in the U.S. economy — revitalization of distressed small manufacturers through new partnerships, private equity’s growing role, and even lower income consumers’ trading-down to lower-priced household durables.

Not all Chinese companies, however, think they have the time to build slow. Lenovo and TCL are in fast-moving businesses where strong global competitors are breathing down their neck in China — especially, Dell, Samsung, Nokia and Motorola. Computers, flat-screen televisions, cell phones, and mobile consumer electronics devices of all kinds may be made in China but controlled by multinationals there who are pulling away from Chinese competitors.

This issue of pace is a problem for China. Product and marketing innovation is rooted in close contact with customers and close collaboration with adjacent, complementary technologies. Chinese state-owned companies have typically been separated from end customers by government-controlled distribution intermediaries. The result is China doesn’t have what Silicon Valley and other innovation clusters have — diffusion of knowledge horizontally and movement of technologists between firms.

Too much can be expected of China’s high-profile companies now. The early rounds of Chinese globalizing favor less glamorous, hard-nosed Chinese companies who have a lot to offer to industrial America right now.

Expat Life: A One-Way Ticket To a New Life in China

By Alan Paul

From The Wall Street Journal Online

Please don’t call me a trailing spouse. It’s a horrible term — sexist and demeaning when applied to a woman and downright emasculating when slapped on a man. But lingo is lingo and facts are facts. And the fact is, in expat land, I am a trailing spouse. I became one the moment I put my career on ice, packed up the house and three kids in suburban New Jersey and moved to Beijing in support of my wife and her new job.

This isn’t all new to me. I haven’t set foot in an office for nearly 10 years, working from home as a magazine writer and editor. As our three children’s primary caregiver I am used to being the only adult male in a room, having chaperoned field trips, assisted in kindergarten classes and shown up for countless midday assemblies. Still, the dividing line is much sharper here. After all, we have uprooted our family and moved to the other side of the world for someone’s job. And it’s not mine.

While my wife, Rebecca, has long had the job that parents like to brag about, as a rising editor at The Wall Street Journal, I’m the one who has managed to live out the widespread male fantasy of getting paid for a state of perpetual adolescence. As a senior writer for Guitar World and the basketball magazine Slam, I was paid to write the kinds of things that most men call procrastination: Who are the five greatest power forwards of all time? Name rock guitar’s 10 greatest riffs. Why isn’t Lynyrd Skynyrd in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? When it was time to leave home and go to work, my destinations were press-row seats at NBA games or New York rock shows. It’s not a life I could easily abandon.

Yet when Rebecca casually mentioned to a friend last December that the Journal’s China Bureau Chief job was posted, I urged her to go for it. She was shocked. I had, after all, nipped in the bud talk of moving to Chicago, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, hesitant to give up my gigs and support system to head off into the great unknown. “But this is different,” I explained. “It’s China!”

Six months later, worn out and frazzled from preparing to pull up stakes, I found myself asking my doctor for a sleeping-pill prescription to help me get some rest. A simple thought ran through my head: “Me and my big mouth.”

For months, I had wondered what it would feel like to board a plane with a one-way ticket to Beijing. When the moment came last August it felt like a huge exhale. A tremendous sense of relief washed over me, knowing that our 15 suitcases were secure in the cargo bin, life as I knew it was fading in the rearview mirror and adventures were looming ahead. Whatever difficulties the transition posed had to be a piece of cake compared to the painstaking, numbing process of erasing our existence in Maplewood, N.J., and emptying the house we had lived in for seven years.

Moving to China with three kids — Jacob, 7, Eli, 5 and Anna, 2 — seemed so wild and ambitious back in Maplewood. Then we arrived here — to the Western style “villa” my wife’s company owns in a tree-lined, European style gated housing compound called Beijing Riviera — and felt anything but exotic. Standing on the playground watching my kids run around, I was surrounded by dozens of moms from around the world. One of the first questions people ask upon meeting one another is, “Where was your last posting?” We were not only fresh off the boat, but fresh on the scene in a larger sense. Our most exotic traits were the reversal of gender rules and our straight-out-of-the-burbs background.

I met an 8-year-old girl whose mother was Indian and father Dutch but who had never lived anywhere but Beijing. Eli became good friends with a 5-year-old British girl with a perfect English accent who was born and raised in Hong Kong. At a school assembly, the principal asked how many kids spoke four languages and about 20% raised their hands.

Fellow expats were not the only ones not quite sure what to make of me. The company driver had to get used to not only having a lady boss, but figuring out how to deal with a male tai tai (lady of the house). Like most people in his position, Mr. D is a bit of a heavy. He is also indisputably loyal, officious and efficient. He has driven us around town to perform the many bureaucratic errands required to live here — processing visas, getting press credentials, applying for driver’s licenses. He also provides invaluable assistance in many of these tasks.

On one such errand, Mr. D’s view of me was stood on its head. I am credentialed and sanctioned as the Beijing Bureau Chief for Slam magazine. We waited in line at the massive, bustling government office where visas are issued for Chinese and foreigners alike. When it was my turn, the policeman processing my paperwork looked up from his stamping to say, “I very like Slam.”

Next came a fairly intense, in-depth basketball discussion. He wanted to know who I thought was the best Chinese basketball player, “after Yao Ming.” Mr. D watched and listened in amazement, then turned to the officer and asked him something in Chinese. The two had an animated chat, and Mr. D looked at me and smiled and laughed. Afterward, something seemed to change in the way he regarded me.

While my wife went off to work, burying herself in a demanding new position, the kids were adapting to life halfway around the world with remarkable ease, nonchalantly starting at a British-run school complete with uniforms. Frankly, they inspired me to keep moving forward and never look back, as I walked to Starbucks everyday, laptop bag slung across my shoulder, grateful for the free wireless service as I waited for my DSL hookup to be activated. It didn’t take long to sell a story on bike riding through crowded, downtown Beijing and start interviewing the stars of the Chinese national basketball team, in search of the next Yao. You know — getting paid for the kind of stuff most people call procrastination.