Every career has a role to play in pushing the world forward. We all work hard in our respective industries, but for some professionals (especially those actively involved in saving our lives), their work defending the weak and preserving our planet garners a lot of respect. Beyond salaries, these career services are what the world falls on in times of crises like extinction and the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are some of the top respected and prestigious careers in the world today.
Lawyer
Lawyers save the world from human rights violators and other offenders whose actions curtail others’ liberties. The public sector also relies heavily on legal services for accountability of hard-earned citizens’ money paid in taxes. In times of war or public conflicts, they facilitate peace negotiations and help restore order. In times of corruption, they’re the “do right” advocates. The benefits of lawyers are endless depending on the type of lawyer and their specialty.
Take Malliha Wilson, for instance. She’s a champion of diversity and a staunch advocate for international justice, defending several people against human rights abuses since 1987. Malliha Wilson is a Tamil Canadian lawyer who began her legal career about four decades ago after obtaining a law degree from McGill University and another from the esteemed York University. After, she specialized in Canadian human rights, corporate and labor law, and other complex litigation, handling many notable cases in the international human rights space.
Malliha started as a young lawyer and the senior counsel for the Ministry of Government Services and became a special legal advisor at the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO). Between 2008 and 2016, she served as the assistant deputy attorney general to the Government of Ontario and was the first visible minority to reach that milestone. She’s also a decorated legal personality in the South Asian Bar Association, the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers, and the Board of the Churchill Society, among several other influential legal factions. Currently, she serves as the senior partner at the Nava Wilson LLP law firm in Toronto, Ontario.
No doubt, lawyers like Malliha are up there on the world stage, pushing the benefits of legal services in Canada as much as other countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States.
Counselor
Universities in the United Kingdom received bids from close to 800,000 applicants in 2020. Over 200,000 did not receive appointment letters for admission. The trends in college applications versus college admissions are similar across several other countries, including the United States. But the responsibilities of an academic counselor go beyond ensuring high school students become prospective students.
A huge part of a school counselor’s job begins after prospective students have gained admission. A college counselor’s job can include addiction counselors for adolescents dealing with addiction and substance abuse issues and crisis counseling, and in today’s internet era, with an online platform like Zoom taking center stage of work, counseling services can be demanded from students at any time anywhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, online college counselor jobs are expected to increase over the next decade by about 13 percent.
Nurse
While many think a nurse is a regular staff member hiding in the shadows of a doctor, nurses play a vital role in the health care industry. With a current population of over 3 million, nursing is the largest health care profession in the U.S.
There’s no denying that nurses were the heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic era. With more dependents than usual, some of the world’s nurses worked with no breaks to save victims of the deadly coronavirus. Even though global crisis intervention measures are gradually seeing some success in defeating the pandemic, the world still has a long way to go, and the entire human race will still count on nurses to usher the world into a post-COVID era.