Best-Paying Jobs in America: Report

A report that lists 25 of the best paying jobs in America from fields such as health care, technology and law found the highest salaries are going to physicians, followed by pharmacy managers and patent attorneys.

A new report that lists 25 of the best-paying jobs in America from fields like health care, technology and law compiled by the career website Glassdoor Inc. found that the highest salaries are going to physicians, followed by pharmacy managers and patent attorneys.

The median base salary of a physician was at $187,876, while for pharmacy managers, who require both pharmaceutical degrees and management experience, it was found to be $149,064. A patent attorney earns about $139,272. The report analyzed salary figures based on data entered into the website from February 2016 to January 2017. Only job positions for which there existed data from more than 100 reported salaries were used in the study.

Interestingly, the median annual earnings of a nuclear engineer, $94,852, who features in the bottom of the list is at about half of that of a doctor. This may be due to the number of available job positions. For instance, under the position of nuclear engineer, Glassdoor only found 155 jobs compared to the more than 13,500 available jobs for physician assistants.

Eleven of the 25 jobs in the list correspond to the tech industry. The next most paying job sectorwise is healthcare, with six jobs, ranging from nurse practitioner, physician to physician assistants.

Here's the complete list of the top jobs along with their median base salaries:

  1. Physician $187,876

  2. Pharmacy Manager $149,064

  3. Patent Attorney $139,272

  4. Medical Science Liaison $132,842

  5. Pharmacist $125,847

  6. Enterprise Architect $112,560

  7. Physician Assistant $112,529

  8. Applications Development Manager $112,045

  9. R&D Manager $111,905

  10. Corporate Controller $110,855

  11. Software Engineering Manager $109,350

  12. IT Architect $105,303

  13. Software Architect $104,754

  14. Nurse Practitioner $104,144

  15. Solutions Architect $102,678

  16. Data Architect $102,091

  17. Actuary $99,507

  18. IT Program Manager $98,883

  19. UX Manager $98,353

  20. Systems Architect $97,873

  21. Plant Manager $97,189

  22. Scrum Master $95,167

  23. Financial Planning & Analysis Manager $94,862

  24. Nuclear Engineer $94,852

  25. Attorney $94,695

Similarly, the skills most sought after by industry according to LinkedIn, Upwork and Opportunity are related with computer programming.

Here are the 10 most sought after skills for 2016-17:

1. Cloud and Distributed Computing

2. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining

3. Web Architecture and Development Framework

4. Middleware and Integration Software

5. User Interface Design

6. Network and Information Security

7. Mobile Development

8. Data Presentation

9. SEO/SEM Marketing

10. Storage Systems and Management

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