High-burnout jobs are professions that pose a high burnout risk, which is a phenomenon characterized by a lack of energy and motivation. For instance, journalists, retail and finance workers, lawyers, teachers, and medical professionals perform jobs with a high burnout rate.
Individuals who experience burnout tend to get detached from their jobs and have low professional efficiency. In general, job burnout is not just tiredness—it is a complex response to high stress levels.
If you are experiencing burnout at work, this article can help you identify high-burnout jobs and learn how to prevent this phenomenon.
Key Takeaways
- Burnout is an experience that affects mental and physical health and leads to low motivation and performance at work.
- This phenomenon is mainly present in high-burnout jobs (e.g., firefighters, social workers, retail workers, IT professionals, etc.)
- Burnout prevention includes recognizing the early symptoms (chronic fatigue, upset stomach, or oversensitivity), seeking support from your network, and taking care of your body and mind by taking breaks, meditating, and exercising.
- Managing your workload with task, energy, and time prioritization, setting boundaries to avoid overworking, and seeking employment at a more suitable workplace is essential for avoiding burnout.
What Is a Burnout and How Does it Happen?
Burnout is a multidimensional response to ongoing workplace stress. It is a state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion that typically demotivates employees and makes them feel disconnected from their jobs. Burnout in the workplace differs from fatigue because it affects employees’ health, behavior, and essential physical and mental capacities.
There are many potential causes of burnout, but they mainly depend on how an individual responds to stress, different duties, pressure, and other common workplace elements. Additionally, the type of workplace can also directly lead to high job or career burnout.
The following can cause work-related burnout in employees:
- High demands and expectations
- Inefficient management
- Workplace discrimination or bullying
- Poor cooperation with coworkers
- Fear of changes and layoff
13+ Jobs With Highest Burnout Rates
There are many types of jobs and work environments. While some workplaces may be relaxed, calm, and pressure-free, others may easily lead to overworking and burnout.
With that in mind, let’s examine the highest burnout jobs and what characterizes them:
#1. Emergency Service Personnel
Emergency service personnel, including rescue teams, police officers, dispatchers, and firefighters, must help people and other living beings facing the most challenging life events. Being exposed to life-threatening surroundings makes such jobs debilitating and mentally exhausting.
Plus, irregular working hours, especially night shifts, can lead to sleep deprivation. These conditions activate employees’ stress response system, leading to burnout and other mental health problems, such as high anxiety levels.
Moreover, the workload for such professionals can increase during pandemics, fires, or other emergencies, making it even harder to preserve their mental and physical well-being.
#2. Healthcare Professionals
Healthcare professions such as nurses, doctors, and paramedics are the highest burnout medical specialties and among the most stressful jobs. Surgeons and other personnel who work in emergency rooms and intensive care units witness traumatic events daily and must have good decision-making skills to do this job.
Stress, pressure, staff shortages, heavy workloads, and long hours can impact one’s well-being and lead to burnout. While some healthcare jobs (e.g., physicians and registered nurses) are among the highest-paid medical jobs, doing them takes a significant emotional toll.
#3. Social Workers
Another high burnout job is being a social worker. These employees must deal with individuals going through dire times. Whether it is substance misuse, child abuse, domestic violence, or other traumatic events, social workers’ duty is to offer help.
Acting professionally in such workplaces requires emotional detachment. However, it is not always easy to do so due to human nature and empathy, especially for overly sensitive individuals.
Additionally, the heavy workload, bureaucracy, and underfunded projects demand high organizational skills. Because of these elements and their emotional burden, social workers are considered the highest burned-out employees.
#4. Teachers
Becoming a teacher requires education and multiple skills and traits, such as empathy, patience, and resourcefulness. Teachers and educators are not only academic professionals who tutor and lecture children and others; they also play a significant role in their emotional and social growth.
In addition to giving lectures, teachers have to create lesson plans and grading systems while handling challenging situations such as fights and misbehavior. The workload and circumstances of educators can cause high stress levels and lead to burnout.
At least 44% of teachers reported burnout symptoms in 2022, placing teaching among the highest burnout jobs. This also applies to university lecturers, 35% of whom reported the same symptoms in the same year. Because of the stressful nature of this job, many teachers opt for a career change nowadays.
#5. Lawyers
Lawyers begin their journey in law schools, which require hard work. This is where the burnout starts. Later, their job is packed with irregular working hours, whether in the office or the courtroom.
Examining and preparing legal documents can be lengthy and tedious. Defending clients and ensuring court victories may also be demanding, especially if the clients’ status is unfavorable. Legal professions are known for high expectations and motivation that can even turn into perfectionism at work.
Being one of the high burnout jobs, this profession (with an average salary rate of around $150,000 annually) may not always compensate for the stress and exhaustion these professionals must experience.
#6. Consultants
Whether they offer internal or external consulting services, consultants’ schedules are often busy with meetings, reports, analyses, urgent discussions, etc. This, along with the constant pressure to deliver top-notch solutions for their clients, makes consulting a high burnout rate job.
Performing well at this job requires proactive and critical thinking and searching for the proper remedies to various problems. A group of consultants may handle multiple tasks simultaneously (e.g., HR consulting, IT consulting), making them even more preoccupied and this job more burdensome.
#7. Financial Professionals
Clerks, accountants, finance analysts, financial planners, and employees with similar professions have high burnout jobs. These employees need to perform different calculations, create various financial reports that involve a lot of numbers, and regulate plenty of paperwork (taxes, invoices, etc.)
Financial professionals typically have to work overtime and know how to adapt to volatile markets. A constant need for change and discovery, together with time pressure and demanding mental work, put the financial sector high on the list, featuring burnout rates by profession.
#8. Retail Workers
Retail workers must cope with everyday client interactions, which can often be energy-draining. Resolving requests, addressing remarks, and working long hours can lead to mental and physical strain and, eventually, burnout. Handling a difficult coworker may be hard, but managing problematic customers can be even more challenging.
Considering how easily negative energy can spread, it’s unsurprising that retail workers are often emotionally and mentally exhausted. Retail employees are also generally underpaid, which leads to low budgets and the need to work multiple part-time jobs, causing burnout.
#9. Tech Industry Professionals
IT jobs are generally fast-paced and high-burnout. This sector constantly evolves and introduces new elements, rules, and working methods. Keeping up with this industry requires much effort (e.g., improving technical skills), which can cause stress, overworking, and burnout.
The IT job market is also volatile, as demand and supply continually change. Modern technology, especially artificial intelligence, has also increased this volatility. Handling a job loss is difficult, but uncertainty about one’s future career may lead to more stress and, therefore, burnout.
#10. Agricultural Workers
High-burnout jobs also permeate the agricultural sector. This is because such jobs imply hard physical labor, one of the leading causes of burnout. Moreover, farmers’ and other workers’ jobs depend heavily on weather conditions.
With elements they have no control over, agricultural workers experience regular strain and stress as inclement weather has a direct impact on their finances and the work they have to do (e.g., working more to compensate for losses due to extreme weather).
#11. Pilots and Flight Attendants
Airline professions are dynamic but are also part of high burnout careers. Being pressured to make the right decisions at the right time, pilots frequently experience stress. They have a massive responsibility as their duty is to operate airplanes and helicopters, ensuring safety for themselves, passengers, and cargo.
Similarly, flight attendants must handle midair emergencies and cater to passengers’ on-flight needs. This also implies dealing with troublesome travelers, changing time zones, working irregular hours, and having long flights while maintaining high levels of professionalism. Jet lag, high responsibility, and numerous duties lead to weariness, emotional fatigue, and burnout.
#12. Journalists
Journalist jobs are unpredictable and highly demanding due to tight deadlines. Reporters and other professionals must act quickly and be in a specific place on time to catch the latest events. This means that they must sometimes travel long distances at dead night and even report on traumatic events.
Overworking and underpayment are also common in journalism and media. Racing against time to prepare reports and write media articles, witnessing shocking stories, and enduring irregular working hours and low compensation make journalism a high burnout job.
#13. Restaurant Workers
Working in a restaurant as a line cook, bartender, or waiter implies short or no breaks, high hospitality skills, proficiency, and promptness. It is also a high-burnout job, with low payments, demanding customers, and the need to multitask and be exceptionally fast.
Interacting with customers brings emotional roller-coasters due to mixed feedback and different customer behavior. Processing so much emotion for a short period can be mentally tiring. Such imbalance often leads to serious turmoil and sometimes even emotional breakdowns.
#14. Entrepreneurs and Corporate Executives
Improving your management and leadership skills to do business successfully requires time, effort, diligence, work, persistence, and consistency. However, keeping high performance rates all the time causes chronic stress, leading to the so-called ‘managerial disease’.
Handling phone calls and emails, juggling briefcases, moving from one conference room to another, and organizing other employees increases executives’ work engagement and chances of burning out.
5 Strategies for Preventing Burnout
If you do a high burnout job, you must protect yourself from the adverse effects it may cause. Regardless of whether it is career burnout or a wrong job, taking proper care of yourself and adequately addressing the potential burnout causes should be your top priority.
Let’s examine five key strategies for preventing burnout:
#1. Recognize Burnout Signs
Burnout states send clear signals to the body and mind. Pay attention to the following signs to prevent burnout more easily:
- Oversensitivity, irritability, low motivation, and poor performance
- Chronic fatigue, emotional numbness, and feeling overwhelmed
- Tensed muscles, headache, jaw tightness, cold hands, and upset stomach
Each person reacts differently to high burnout job stress. Still, detecting these symptoms and using stress-coping strategies such as journaling, yoga, meditation, and mindfulness is the key to good health.
#2. Take Regular Breaks
Taking regular breaks from your work is essential for preventing exhaustion. Sometimes, you may do a lot of work and keep pushing to avoid potential stagnation. While this may seem like a good idea, it is only good if you do not feel tired. Otherwise, you can grab a coffee or start a small talk with a colleague.
Physical rest is also important, even when your primary work is mental. You can stretch, walk, and do breathing exercises to release stress and tension from your body. Remember, we are not machines, and it is normal to get rest when you feel drained.
#2. Set Boundaries
Preserving your health when doing high-burnout jobs requires you to set boundaries and regain control over the working environment. If you agree to a specific work schedule, goals, and KPIs, your employer should not ask you to stay longer, work more, and reach higher targets.
The same scenario includes receiving calls outside working hours, being asked to check emails, or working on weekends when you are not supposed to. Some employers may also take your time off due to a heavy workload.
To set boundaries, you must learn to refuse irregular schedules and excessive work assignments. Confidence in your decisions will lead to better workplace treatment and fewer chances of burnout.
#3. Manage Workload
Workload management eases the burden of a heavy workload and allows you to distribute your energy efficiently across tasks. First, rank your duties—create a to-do list and prioritize the most important and demanding ones.
This will help you complete key tasks with tight deadlines first and leave space for minor assignments later. This is practical for two reasons—side tasks do not require much energy and concentration, and you can take a break from big assignments by doing small ones.
#4. Seek Support
Although high burnout jobs affect the majority of people doing them, addressing burnout issues individually may prevent them. Receiving support from your colleagues and creating an overall friendly work atmosphere can help you feel like you belong and improve your well-being. If your employer offers assistance programs, make sure to enroll and ask for help.
You can also reach out to other people from your network, such as friends, family, and close relatives. They may not have had the same experience as you, but they can offer help and advice.
#5. Consider a Career Change
Over time, you may realize you do not share the same values as those you work with. So, if you notice irreconcilable differences between you and your employer or colleagues, consider changing your environment.
A specific work culture, dynamics, and atmosphere can lead to burnout-like states, such as feelings of uncertainty, tiredness, or even imposter syndrome. To avoid this, begin job hunting and consider pursuing a more suitable career path for your personality.
Final Thoughts
High burnout jobs are more likely to cause fatigue, demotivation, low work performance, and even health issues. Professions, such as physician, nurse, journalist, restaurant and fast-food worker, teacher, and lawyer exhibit the highest stress and burnout rates.
It’s important to recognize burnout signs, manage your workload, and take occasional breaks to rest your mind and body. Setting boundaries (e.g., not checking emails on your day off) is another crucial factor in avoiding burnout.
If your work environment does not suit your personality, you can also seek advice from your colleagues and your network (friends and family) who may have had a similar experience. If the situation is hard to improve, you can consider a career change.
