So Other Occupations for a Character
Often times in gaming we keep reusing the same occupations over and over. I know as a Player and a GM that the same sorts of people keep showing up, time after time after time. So this list is one way for myself, and potentially you my reader, to include a few different vibes in your game.
Some games have a limited subset of occupations. Call of Cthulhu is one such game, with a very specific main set of where characters come from occupation wise. This is intended to maintain the look and feel of the core setting.
Other places I have used to pull in real world occupations are the major job boards and the Occupational Handbook. The easiest way is to log into your account at one of the major job boards (if you have your own login already made) or just put in a larger city in the location search field. So run it and pull in a search of the last 30 days worth of jobs. Copy it all and paste into a text friendly location such as Notebook or the website www.darkcopy.com (my personal favorite).
Copy again into your word processing program of choice to do some cleanup work and if you want to, as I did with a large list one time, put the cleaned up list of only job titles into a spreadsheet program to sort alphabetically and remove duplications.
Yes it takes a little work, but the efforts can yield a long list of potential different, more modern oriented of course, occupations. These are suitable for modern, near future, and with minor tweaks, far future SF games. The genre does not really matter in the timeframe. These jobs work equally well for espionage, conspiracy, surreal, horror, cyperpunk, superhero, or even urban fantasy.
The following list was pulled from a poem that was published in a magazine. They are all dealing with new ways to move, aggregate, adjust, and deal with customers and people in the online setting. Some are older, such as Copywriter and Brand Agent. Others are brand new and really are less than 10 years old such as the Sponsored Blogger or Notable User.
Some research would be necessary to find out more about the more esoteric ones. Since many of them are new, creations of companies attempting to tame the wild Internet (Used in the broadest term here), others are outgrowths of existing occupations, taken in new directions.
Have fun using them, or finding inspiration for character backgrounds or even entire types of characters in this list.
In Alphabetical Order
Aesthetic King
Bit Tracker
Bottom-Line Analyzer
Brand Agent
Brand Ambassador
Brander
Change Agent
Copywriter
Designer
Illustrator
Interface Wizard
Marketer
Meme Generator
Multi-Platform Guru
Notable User
Online Retailer
Profit-Maximizer
Re-Poster
Social-Media Consultant
Sponsored Blogger
Starred Commentator
Viral Relayer
