Service and Maintenance Careers

Everywhere you look, there are incredible feats of science and technology. Vehicles powered by intricate motors, complex machines packed with a ton of memory and mind-blowing functionality, gadgets and gizmos a-plenty, whozits and whatzits galore (credit: The Little Mermaid). And how came up with all that stuff? Whose brilliant minds engineered such astonishing feats of human ingenuity?

Not you.

Nah, you’re the…fix-it guy. You know enough about the inner workings to be able to tell if this knob needs tightening, or that lever requires attention. You could never assemble one of these things yourself, but you’re a pro at keeping it chugging along once it’s up and running.

Yeah, you may not get all the glory (or the money), but service and maintenance professionals are just as essential as the geniuses who invented the contraptions that need to be serviced and…maintenanced…in the first place. When a machine breaks down—and boy do they love to do that—someone has to be able and willing to jump in there and get those gears whirring once again. It’s certainly not going to be one of those aforementioned geniuses. They’re already back at work, coming up with more brilliant ideas. A service tech is not an idea man. He thinks with his hands.

That said, it’s still a step above skilled labor jobs, generally speaking. You really need to be a whiz when it comes to your particular area of focus. If servicing automobiles, you’d better know a car inside and out, and those are some awfully complicated pieces of machinery. Aircraft technicians, even more so. Photocopier repair guy? Eh, maybe not so much, but you still need to know your way around a toner cartridge. If you don’t, one of those things could explode all over you, and then have fun going out in public looking like an incompetent chimney sweep.

We’re not talking a ton of school here though, and as is usually the case when all you need’s a high school diploma…you’re not going to be rolling in it. Unless by “it,” you mean motor oil, in which case you might be practically rolling in it from punch in to punch out.

But think 25k to 35k, obviously more if you’re working on especially advanced instruments like fighter jets or 10-speed blender. (Are all 10 speeds really necessary? Will there ever be a time when you may desperately need to liquefy rather than puree?)

Such a small salary is to be expected. You have a specialized area of expertise, yeah, but it’s not anything a chimp couldn’t learn to do given enough time and individualized training. That’s not to take a giant poop on what you do (we blame the chimp for that one, by the way); it’s just that you perform a service.

And that service…ain’t brain surgery.

Careers In This Field