My wife once took classes to become a court reporter.  She even bought her own stenograph (is that what they are called?) for the training.  Unfortunately, she never completed the training due to other circumstances.

Unfortunate because court reporters earn an average salary of $59,970.

CNN.com reports this number in their article Five surprising salaries:

Surprising salary: $59,970*. You might not have thought typing could earn you so much money, but once you realize court reporters can’t miss a word — often in fast-talking situations — it makes more sense.

Here is the other end of the surprising salaries spectrum:

Surprising salary: $27,070. Seeing as paramedics have high stress jobs that require them to be on call and ready to save lives at a moment’s notice, you might expect their mean annual salary to be higher.

*Mean annual salary information based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

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Steven Rothberg over at CollegeRecruiter.com provides a money quote in his post Why Today’s College Students Need Not Fear Exploding Offers.  Obviously, Steven’s market is geared towards college students, but this paragraph is applicable to all businesses when it comes to hiring (emphasis mine):

The recession of 2001-03 was worse than the recession of 2008 and employers are looking backwards in order to better understand what to do as they move forwards. Although many and perhaps most employers have scaled back their college hiring plans for this spring, there’s little talk of exploding offers. More employers realize that recessions are tactical problems and college recruiting is strategic. You don’t solve tactical problems by grossly altering and certainly not abandoning your strategic vision. You may tweak the strategy here and nip it a bit there in order to survive the tough times, but organizations which confuse tactics with strategy are organizations which tend not to survive let alone thrive.

That is excellent advice for any company in this present economy.  I experienced this abandonment of strategic vision back in 2001 as a Regional Sales Manager for a high-tech company.  The company was small, but growing quickly in a niche market.  Unfortunately, the President buckled under the potential economic impact of a recession and abandoned the very principles that had grown the business.  Instead of slight adjustments, he collapsed the entire company by attempting to go a different direction.

I’m reminded of a short post from Seth Godin a while back titled That moment.  Here it is in it’s entirety:

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back.

That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.

All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.

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