What jobs pay the most/have the best benefits?

Professional American football players get the most pay and benefits that I am aware of.

What? You don't think you could have a career as a professional American football player?

My experience is that doing the job that is best suited for you, and doing it well, will give you the most pay and benefits you are likely to get.

There are three resources that I recommend to help you figure out the type of person you are, what your strengths are, and what your special talents are. After you know this, you can find the careers that are best suited for who you are. You like to read books, so let me recommend three books.

One is the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This measures how you (as a person) take in information, how you process it, and how you output it. Engineers fit into certain categories of personality types. A good book to read about this is Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. Your school career center may know how you can take the MBTI assessment, and may be able to provide help in interpreting it. Even without taking the assessment, the book can give you a good idea of the personality type you have, and you can read about the kinds of careers that people with that personality type do well in.

Another resource is Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. The cost of the assessment is built into the cost of the book, so if you get a used one, be sure it has an unused access code. The basic idea of this book is that you come into the world with certain strengths, and it won't make much difference on how hard you work on your weaknesses, you will get a lot more results by putting the same effort into working with your top five strengths. Page 9 says, "You cannot be anything you want to be, but you can be a lot more of who you already are. " It does not give as much advice about what careers to choose, but if your strengths are different from those that are supportive of engineering, you should look elsewhere for a career.

Third, in his book, Goals, How to Get Everything You Want - Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible, Brian Tracy tells how to find your special talents. On pages 123 and 124 he lists 8 ways to discover what your special talent is. Notice how one of them is "easy for you to learn and easy for you to do"
1. You love to do it.
2. You do it well.
3. This talent has been responsible for most of your success and happiness in life up till now. (Something you have enjoyed doing from an early age.)
4. It is easy for you to learn and easy for you to do.
5. It holds your attention (naturally you talk about it, you think about it, you learn about it).
6. You love to learn about it and desire to excel in this area.
7. When you do it, times stands still for you. You can go for long hours without eating or sleeping because you are so involved in it.
8. You really admire and respect those who are good at what you are most suited to do. You want to emulate them.

Another thing to remember abut your career, whatever career it is, is that you are getting paid to solve problems. The more people you help, the more you get paid. the better the solution is, the better you get paid. Whatever you do, do it the best that you can. Don't take shortcuts either in your schooling or in doing what you are paid to do. Integrity is highly valued, don't cheat yourself out of it. The more Integrity you have, the more people will trust you to solve their problems that are within your skill set.

Every profession has its employees with varying ranged salaries, so it's very hard to sum up as a whole. Yet the most common top list is :
•Management Professionals
•Software Engineers + IT professionals
•Chartered Accountants
•Entertain Industry (Modelling & Acting)
•Aviation Professionals
•Investment Bankers
•LAW Professionals
•Merchant Navy
•Medical Professionals
•Petroleum Engineering Professionals
•SAP Consultants
•Interpreters and Translators

I would encourage you to find the area that interest you and then focus on improving skillsets. That way you will never get outdated and learning will become easy. Its important to change with times and only passion towards what you want to do will help you get there. give your best and everything else will follow.

All the best