5 High Paying Jobs You Can Get Without A College Degree

5 High Paying Jobs You Can Get Without A College Degree

Not everyone wants to go to college.

The mere idea of spending four or more years trudging between university lecture halls, writing papers and taking exams is more than some people can bear — not to mention the cost of tuition, and the burden of student-loan debt.

While it’s often thought that those who opt out of college limit their employability, career options and earning potential, that’s not necessarily the case.

“There are plenty of great jobs that pay well for people who don’t have degrees. At the end of the day, she  college degrees don’t make or break careers. When people ask managers what was special about their best hires, the answers tend to be things like “she’s a team player” or “he shows initiative.”
“It’s never about whether they went to college, or where.

What jobs are we talking about? We looked at data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Glassdoor, Indeed.com and LinkedIn, and then cross-checked the data with hiring managers to make sure they had actual vacancies.

So here are the hottest jobs that don’t require a degree.

App developers

There are more than 3 million apps available in the Google Play store and more than 2.2 million in Apple’s app store, never mind the millions on Facebook. Each one has been coded by someone. Someone who doesn’t necessarily have a college degree or even a reputation for being a geek.

Everyone can, and should, learn to code in 15 weeks or less. According to Glassdoor, the average salary for an app developer is $97,789.

Administrative services managers

It pays to excel in minding other people’s business — their calendars, agendas, mail, meetings, priorities — and orchestrating details so that everything runs smoothly. It’s not the kind of thing you study in college, but something that you learn to do on the job..

You might start as an executive assistant or in customer services, and then become an office manager.
The people who get to the next rung of that ladder are especially in high demand, reports Indeed.com.

Administrative services managers can earn as much as $110,000 in big cities..

Loan officers

Sure, to work in banking you have to be good at math, but what you learned in high school may be enough to start you off in the lending industry.


And while the starting pay might be under $20 an hour,  Glassdoor data says  loan officers can earn more than $139,000.

Certified computer professionals

It’s an absolute myth that you have to have a degree in computer science to earn a healthy living working in the tech industry.

Not only that, but having the right certification will give you a leg up on people who only have bachelor’s degrees because passing the exam is proof that you have the skills.

Anyone can sign up and take a course, although six to 12 months of actual lab experience is recommended. Workers who have the basic CompTIA+ certification, for example, earn around $50,000. Add a second certification, and your paycheck goes up to $80,000. Pre-certification courses are available nationwide and online. The average salary in the industry is $108,900.

Sales managers

Good business-to-business salespeople are hard to find. Those who consistently meet their quotas are rare. So while some companies list a degree as a prerequisite for employment, they will sometimes forgo the requirement for recruits who are perennially successful and can deliver.

“If a hiring manager is in a hurry to fill a role and needs to choose between a person who can eat the competition for lunch and a person who has a degree, they’ll choose the closer.

Sales managers in big cities earn an average of $89,238, reports Indeed.com, with a few superstars making more than $200,000.