20-Year Prospect

20-Year Prospect

There'll always be someone who forgets to turn the hot plate off…which is why, even though the number of people in your profession is only expected to grow by seven percent between now and 2022, you can count on having a job, well, forever.

In 2012, 365,000 homes burned to the ground in the United States. While putting out a simple house fire may be a piece of cake, keep in mind that some of these homes burned in big fire events like the Waldo Canyon conflagration at Colorado Springs, which took out 347 homes in June 2012.

In the future, you may end up stuck facing down massive wildfires instead of a single burning building. Thanks to a lovely little thing called climate change, wildfires in the western U.S. increased in number at a rate of seven per year between 1984 and 2011. These fires have also been getting bigger, stretching into territory with lots of brush and trees where the flames are harder to combat.

So, yes, you'll most definitely have a job in twenty years…but are you sure you want to take the chance of leaving this world as crispy as a piece of burnt bacon?