I dont know if its really “Lesser Known”, but pest control is a very interesting field to work in and isnt often talked about in many circles.

Its essentially future proof, as we’re always going to have pests. Its one of those jobs where its the same enough every day that you get a little better, but different enough from call to call to keep you challenged and stay interested.

I wished that I had even considered it an open back in High School and gone to college/university to actually study pests in an academic setting, and be able to participate in some of the groundbreaking work taking place currently.

For one glorious summer I was a small boat sailing instructor at a summer camp. My life was sitting on the beach and teaching kids to sail. I had a wonderful tan, and sun bleached hair. My life was stress free and wonderful. I got into it by learning how to sail at that very camp, and applying for the job. It paid minimum wage, but it also came with free room and board, and I was a kid, so I didn’t really need any money anyways.

Not in this field anymore, but used to be a landscaper for a handful of years.

A lot of people think that landscaping is just grass cutting, but it’s called that because you are literally scaping the land, and sometimes beyond that.

Hell, roof work, foundation laying, pressure washing, among other things, have been a part of my duties during my time in that field.

This is an absolutely boring one, but did you know part of your seatbelt, right now, could just be colored in?

How about your seat cover? Your steering wheel? Some poor bastard had to go get that out of stock, bring it into repair, go over the entire lot, and take a special pencil to color in those little scratches, or mark it as unrepairable.

I was that bastard for awhile. It sucked. 10 hours going over whatever needed checking that day. An “exciting” day meant a defect hit the line and we needed to hunt it down, hopefully without stopping production.

“Repair” can cover a lot of things, and that was the worst repair work I’ve ever done.

I work in the surgical pathology department in a hospital.

Anything you get removed from surgery comes to me to be examined. Then I describe what I have and what sort of pathology I can see with the naked eye. I select and cut out pieces of tissue that are important to the case. The tissue undergoes further processing and eventually reaches the desk of a pathologist (a type of physician) who examines the tissue microscopically, forms a diagnosis, and ultimately signs out the case.

My job can assist with several things depending on the case…

1. To help the clinician confirm or determine what type of lesion or disease process the patient has
2. To document and confirm that a surgery was necessary
3. To stage cancer cases
4. To determine whether or not a cancer or lesion has been completely removed from the patient and there is none left inside their body
5. To make sure the patient does not have an unsuspected cancer

I see everything from tiny boring specks of tissue they biopsy during a colonoscopy to large cancer resection cases.

The other day, I got an almost entirely necrotic above the knee amputation with maggots. A few days before that I got a 9 lb spleen. It’s fun in the lab.

In the US, my job generally requires a very specialized 2 year master’s degree (on top of a bachelor’s degree in any subject). In other countries, the role of my job can be fulfilled by different types of people depending on the country and education will be different.

I found out about the job on Google lol. I was looking for something hands on in healthcare or anatomy related, but I didn’t like patient contact. I would probably select this career again if I had a second go around. It pays pretty well and is interesting. But grad school in the US is very expensive.

From 2005 to 2008 in South Florida I created and ran a permit expediting company. It came from my mom managing a construction company, them having too many contracts, and not enough contractors to run their own permits. I saw a need and got together with a couple of friends to incorporate.

We pitched it to the owner of the company my mom managed and got a contract from them. We eventually picked up other companies as well.

So the job went like this: one of us be assigned to a specific geographic area or company for the day, we would stop by the office, pick up the paperwork for whatever permits had to be filed, retrieved, delivered.

We would visit the city building department and depending on the city (each ran things in drastically different ways with no consistency) we would be there for 15 minutes or all day. Some permits would be a quick, single day turnaround or could be in bureaucratic hell for a month or two. We’d charge based on the complexity and time involved in getting permits approved. Then we would either deliver the permits to the contractor or the job site. On occasion we would deliver liens to customers who didn’t pay their bills which could sometimes get dangerous.

The only people I’ve ever met that did this exact type of work were people I met within city building departments. It’s a relatively boring, but uncommon profession.

The job came with all kinds of weird knowledge that I’ve never had to use again, like how many palm trees on the property equal a shade tree for the purpose of landscaping requirements. Than answer back then was 3.

The company was born out of a construction boom after Hurricane Katrina and died during the housing market crash of 2008.

Edited for spelling and sentence structure.

Also edit: sometimes getting permits approved would involve meeting with city engineers, making corrections on engineering documents, and just having a good rapport with the city.

Also, currently I am a change control analyst for a telecom company. My job description literally says “protect the network”. Essentially network engineers submit projects to me, I check the projects for accuracy, impact risk, importance, etc. A lot of the time, I reject work because of errors, cutting corners, not enough preparation, etc.

My job is to balance the projects being done VS how many customers I want to piss off because their services get taken down. My engineers either absolutely love me, or would like to have the opportunity to stab me in a dark alley, there really is no in between. Generally the ones I reject often for crap work are the ones that also want to stab me.

I have a typical job, but just today I was reading an article about different types of potatoes, and they quoted a post harvest potato physiologist.

I work in a museum adapting internationally touring exhibitions to align with their host communities. It’s a great career - there’s travel, I get to see behind the scenes of museum collections, and I get to study other cultures as a job. I do get paid to match the fact that I work for a charity.

My background is in the museum sector, which you can get into either through a PhD in study of a relevant field to the specific museum, or through a graduate program in museum/ conservation studies (which is what I did).

So far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people that do this job globally, which I suppose makes it lesser known!

I’m a designer, which is a well-known profession, but I design substations, which almost no one I’ve run into has heard of.

Substations are like giant jungle-gyms for electricity. They’re a grouping of electric structures that transfer high-voltage electricity to low-voltage, or low voltage to high voltage. They’re a major part of our electricity distribution system. You drive by at least one every day, most likely.

I got into it by chance. Right place, right time. I went back to school and got my AS in drafting for industrial design and manufacturing. I applied to this job on accident, thinking it was for manufacturing, then when I was offered an interview, accepted it despite the mixup. Why not? They offered about double what other jobs were for a drafter, so I took it.

8 months into the job, a designer position opened up, so I interviewed for that and got the promption!

Door is still wide open, despite the general idea that drafters are becoming less of a demand. Based on my experience, they’re sorely needed, especially for civil jobs. Also I get paid higher than a friend of mine who got her masters in interior architecture (also a drafting/design gig), with just my AS. I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Totally worth it.

I stumbled into the field of construction cost estimating, because I wasn’t watching where I was going, and it has been good to me. There’s only an education/certification requirement for the companies that do the largest commercial projects (at least in my region). However, there’s a pretty large job market because there are a ton of smaller commercial & residential builders.

I’ll never be wealthy, but I make a decent living, and my work/life balance is good. I primarily work in the office, but get out in the field enough to keep it from getting boring. There is also a good ability to move up into project management, which can pay better, but also has a higher stress level in general.

I work in the Conference and Events dept of my local college. We’re essentially the official school party planners.

My main job is pretty commonplace but I moonlight as a fire performer. I got into it kinda by chance but it has consumed my life. I actually have to carry insurance and do have certifications to do fire. In fact, I’m licensed to write letters of recommendation for new performers. I also have to pull permits for it in my city.

I also do burlesque and sideshow, but there isn’t really a formal process other than deciding you want to try hammering a 5" nail into your head. Sideshow is best described as putting things where they DON’T belong. Being a social outcast and knowing people helps.

Would I do it again? Yes, it’s a fulfilling art form. But unfortunately the industry is superficial garbage, and the conditions of your birth will greatly affect the ratio between effort put in and success.

I’m a geologist, but not the fun kind that gets to look at actual rocks.

I do environmental and some geotechnical work, which pretty much boils down to “Is the dirt poisoned?” and “How hard do I have to squish the dirt to make the future building not fall down?” There’s few things to get excited about, but it’s steady work and pays the bills.

I create control systems, currently in the automotive industry but the same principles apply to any control system, which is the thing I love about this subject. The skillset is about trimming down a problem to it’s absolute bare essentials. I always wondered what makes machines tick and control theory is the systematic expression of that pursuit. We model the system or phenomena in question and then develop the control in simulation. Once we have the desired result, it is usually realised as a software object that is embedded in a computer.

I started on this path as an unemployed and disillusioned 32 year old engineer, retrained over a period of 2 years and it turned out to be a huge source of fulfillment.

I used to work as a line stander on Capitol Hill in DC. You get paid to stand in line for lobbyists for hearings and committees. Many times your there a day before and camping out overnight with all the other line standers. It’s like an old school concert ticket environment, if you ever camped out for concert tickets back in the day.