What jobs most people assume do NOT make a lot of money but in reality pay very well?

Call Center Jobs : Especially those involved in selling credit cards, mortgage loans and other such financial instruments. Recently I have applied for a home loan. When the person came to collect the documents we had small talk while he was going through the documents. I being of a curious nature wanted to know how does the entire process work? Who gets how much in the entire transaction etc. I was amazed to learn that the call center person makes around Rs 50-60k fixed and if the sales are good he/she can make upto 1 lac Rs per month. (He also told me girls generally achive higher sales ) To give you a comparison an average to above average IITian makes this much after working really hard for 6 yrs (2+4).

City sanitation workers (e.g., garbage-truck drivers) get up into the $100,000 range in the middle/later parts of their careers.  And, every few months, we hear about another police-salary scandal where five or ten officers have earned $200,000 to $400,000 (yes, four hundred grand) in a single year.  These last are generally due to overlapping union phenomena (retroactive back-pay increase, vacation buyout, many hours on extra/hazard duty shifts, etc.), but they do go several standard deviations outside the norm.

Emergency Dispatchers.  Surprisingly there are comprehensive college programs which last only 8 months to become certified.  (Already the savings versus a 4 year degree are considerable).  Starting wage for an entry level position are at $45 K a year, plus awsome benefits.  This can vary (such as in Canada where they start at $60K).  This is in an increasing job market prospectively, and there are many dispatching jobs besides just police, ambulance and firefighters.   I haven't done it before only researched it a bit, but it seems to be intersting with the newest technologies available and call taking can be more exciting than it seems and requires a good deal of challenge!

Any kind of obscure specialty job that only a few people can do.  Repairing specific, unusual pieces of machinery, writing copy for a very specific purpose, obscure areas of law...People tend to assume that these weird jobs are lame and low-paying, but they pay a lot precisely because they're obscure.  When someone needs that job done, the lack of competition drives your price up.

Nurses - Typically make $70K-$80K  Also they work in eight hour shifts and are full time at 40 hours a week and aren't subject to the horrible work hours that medical residents have to go through. Nobel Prize winning physicist - $500K/year Now most academics don't make that nearly much money, but people are surprised that people that at the top in science make as much money as they do.  What happens if you are extremely famous is that universities will get into a bidding war for your name.  You are also likely to have a lot of connections (both political and academic) that is useful for the university. Business professors (must have Ph.D. from tier one university) - $200K-$300K.  Same thing. Chinese factory workers - It's only about US $200/month but the important thing is that you get free housing and often subsidized food so what you make is completely yours.  Also the hours are very flexible, and the wages are per hour so that you can make more money if you work overtime. Illegal Chinese restaurant workers in the United States - Same thing.  You pay US$50K to get smuggled into the US.  You work for three years.  Two years to pay off your debt, and anything you make in the third year is yours which means you end up with US$25K.  Now that sounds exploitative, but the one thing that gets factored in is that you end up with free food and rent (in NYC!!!) for three years, and your income is tax free. Filipino and Indonesian housemaids in Hong Kong - US$600/month but again free food and rent (notice a pattern here?).

These are the best paying full-time US jobs that don't require 4-year college degrees (although, they may require more than just a high-school diploma). This data is a little dated (2009), but it is probably still true. Source: http://blogs.payscale.com/ask_dr_salary/2009/01/six-figure-jobs-and-no-4year-degree.html

Railroad engineers [1] are paid very well in Denmark. If you meet the few requirements (completed high school, minimum height of 1.65 m., not colorblind, no criminal record etc.) and you can find an apprenticeship you can look forward to a yearly salary of about $100,000. The "education" alternates between theory and practice and you are paid approximately $4,000 per month during the 10 months the training lasts! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_engineer [2] http://www.ug.dk/uddannelser/andreerhvervsrettedeuddannelser/andreuddtransport/lokomotivfoerer.aspx

In India, Construction material supplier. People think of construction business as huge money market, but they need to invest a lot to scale into big level. But the suppliers are more or less similar to real estate brokers. They yield equal profit or even more than builders without much investment. Money involved is large in construction business.

BART Employees (and if you don't know why we assume so,  see )