Women at Work: Is your job stressful? You're not alone

As I was slowly perusing through my Facebook newsfeed the other day, a picture of the "Most Stressful Jobs of 2016" caused me to stop and exclaim, "What???" to myself.

Rated as the most stressful job for this year was enlisted military personnel. Numbers two through four were firefighter, pilot and police officer. And there, sitting at the fifth-most stressful job, the reason for my surprise, was event coordinator. Really? I was intrigued enough to hunt down the picture, the correlating article and then did a little research as to the methodology of these findings.

Stress comes with all our jobs at one point or another. Unfortunately for some, stress is present 100 percent of the time. The research showed the amount of stress an employee experiences could be predicted by looking at the typical demands and possible crises. High scores were given if a particular demand was a major part of the job with fewer points given if the demand was a small part of the job.

The risks included:

• travel

• growth potential

• deadlines

• working in the public eye

• competitiveness

• physical demands

• environmental conditions

• hazards encountered

• own life at risk

• life of another at risk

• meeting the public

After reviewing the stressors, I can easily agree on the top four stressful jobs of 2016, and thank you to those of you who are in these jobs. I should add, even though these jobs are rated most stressful, they might not fall in the "best paying" category.

So, event coordinator, number five. I had to lean back in my chair and ponder my past experience and the events I have coordinated. I thought of the employee parties, the golf tournaments, the client training seminars and events, and even family gatherings (which is no small feat). I have pages upon pages of instructions for any co-worker that should ever assume the portion of my job that handles events.

Event coordination deals with taking someone's vision and ideas along with the purpose of the event and turning them in to a large scale, smoothly ran, successful event. It requires months of planning, tons of phones calls and many minute details tracked. The stress that comes with this job must be handled gracefully while in the eyes of the public and has to go off without a hitch.

I am not sure I am 100 percent in agreement with this job being rated in the top five based on my experience, but then again, I am not running an event coordinator business trying to coordinate more than one function at a time for many clients.

Sixth on the list was public relations executive followed by senior corporate executive, broadcaster, newspaper reporter and finally, taxi driver.

Where are the jobs such as nurses, physicians, correctional officers, etc., these people have jobs where lives may hang in the balance as well, including their own quite possibly.

Keep in mind that a balance in the stress factors listed above is what differentiates "most stressful" and "least stressful." Every career has at least one high-stress element. Of the 200 jobs tracked by this study, here are the jobs considered to be least stressful: Information security analyst, diagnostic medical sonographer, tenured university professor, hair stylist and medical records technician.

Aside from sonographer, none of the least stressful jobs would be a good fit for me, so I never will know what it is like to have a job with less stress. Does less stress mean boring?

All jobs come with a certain amount of stress, but if you are on the job hunt now, keep the above stressful and less than stressful jobs in mind. Know yourself and what you can handle before applying for a specific job.