Production foreman
- Median pay: $56,387
- % who say their job is stressful: 85.5%
From small machine shops to giant assembly lines, production supervisors oversee all sorts of manufacturing operations.
Cathleen Kadletz is a production supervisor for RedEye, a 3D printing company. It's not a traditional manufacturer but the stresses she faces are similar to that of other production supervisors -- only compressed into a shorter time frame.
"We don't have two to three months to produce something; we have two to three days," she said.
Related: Women take on manufacturing
Speed is important but quality matters as well. That can be hard to juggle when clients are pestering you to complete a job.
Many production supervisors start with little formal eduction. They rise through the ranks by demonstrating initiative and capability on the job.
Production supervisors are fairly well paid, with a median salary of more than $56,000. Big factories may pay foremen in the low six figures. Smaller production lines pay considerably less, but the pressure may not be any lower.
Methodology: Starting from a database of more than 9,000 jobs, PayScale used data from over 120,000 respondents who rated their jobs for quality of life factors. The 15 were selected based on the national median pay for workers with at least five or seven years' experience and the percent of workers surveyed who said their jobs were "fairly stressful" or "extremely stressful." Only one job per "job family" was included. PayScale conducted the survey between August 2011 and August 2013.
