Top Jobs For 2017 Texas College Graduates

AUSTIN, TX — As they ready to enter the "real world," Texas college graduates ready to grab life by the horns proceed with mixed emotions, happy and hopeful after earning their degrees but fearful and anxious about finding work.

If only there were a source from someone who has crunched the numbers, providing not only an assessment of the best top jobs for grads but also the location where jobs might abound. That source surely would take some of the anxiety out of seeking a rewarding and fulfilling career after college graduation.

Well, there is such a source. Zippia, a career resource guide offering career advice and guidance, has compiled a list of the top jobs in Texas culled after exhaustively culling data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the state Department of Labor and statistics from ONet Online, a government source containing data on job requirements.

After amassing the data, Zippia focused on four major metrics:

• Location quotient, a measure of how common a job is a given state.
• A search limited to jobs in Texas that require a college degree.
• Average annual entry level salary .
• Projected growth as an industry over the next 10 years.

"By limiting the dataset to only those jobs that require a bachelors degree, we were left with 49 jobs to rank," Zippia officials wrote in their report. "We then ranked each job on each criteria from 1 to 49 with 1 being the best. Next, we took the average of each job’s rankings to create a 'Job Score.' Finally, we ranked every job’s 'Job Score' from 1 to 49 with 1, again, being the best."

And, so, without further ado, here is Zippia's list of the Top 10 best jobs for 2017 college grads in Texas:

1. Computer Systems Analysts
2. Airline Pilots, Copilots, and Flight Engineers
3. Cartographers and Photogrammetrists
4. Sales Engineers
5. Database Administrators
6. Medical and Clinical Laboratory Technologists
7. Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education
8. Credit Counselors
9. Web Developers
10. Technical Writers

The top job under the "computer systems analysts" category zeroes in on the EPIC variety — Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing — for which certified consultants are in high demand. Its popularity, coupled with the degree in difficulty, makes such specialists in high demand.

This helps explain the nice starting salary for qualified grads, just shy of $80,000. The idea of EPIC is over this reporter's head, but a source called TechTarget defines the concept quite nicely.

"EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) is a 64-bit microprocessor instruction set, jointly defined and designed by Hewlett Packard and Intel, that provides up to 128 general and floating point unit registers and uses speculative loading, predication, and explicit parallelism to accomplish its computing tasks," the website explains. "By comparison, current 32-bit CISC and RISC microprocessor architectures depend on 32-bit registers, branch prediction, memory latency, and implicit parallelism, which are considered a less efficient approach in microarchitecture design."

Got it? Good, because we didn't understand any of that.

For those grads really focused on soaring high, pilots continue to be a sought-after specialty with an average starting salary of $85,390. Extensive college work isn't needed either, with commercial pilots jobs typically requiring a high school diploma or equivalent. Airline pilots, however, typically need a bachelor's degree.

All pilots paid to fly also must have at least a commercial pilot's license from the Federal Aviation Administration, an Airline Transport Pilot certificate and other related requirements.

Cartographers and photogrammetrists are the third-ranked job among the "best," with a $51.346 starting salary. Under this category is the job of imagery analyst, a specialist performing high level/expert imagery analysis, imagery products productions, intelligence systems architecture and evaluation of procedures, processes, techniques, models and/or methodologies used to develop complex solutions to requirements.

In terms of education requirements, they range from a high school diploma to a college degree. "Most police and detectives must graduate from their agency’s training academy before completing a period of on-the-job training," a job description reads. Among other requirements for candidates are U.S. citizenship, minimum age of 21 years old, and an ability to meet rigorous physical and personal qualification standards. A felony conviction or drug use may disqualify a candidate seeking a job in this field.

For more details on the other top jobs, click on each to view expanded information on job requirements and starting salaries.

>>> Image via Shutterstock