If you are in the market for a job change, consider looking outside the box to find a new career. These six fringe professions may inspire you to start looking in unexpected places.

Oil and Gas Diver
Although the Deep Horizon oil spill may have soured many on the prospects of oil exploration in the Gulf, plenty of energy companies are looking to the sea for the next big oil fields. And the only way to get deep-sea oil rigs started is by sending in divers. Although the job is difficult and can be dangerous, many oil and gas divers make up to $80,000 a year laying cables, installing rigging and welding pipes. And for divers interested in working on sustainable energy sources, offshore wind farms also need divers to help lay foundations for sea-based windmills.

Pharmaceutical Test Subjects
Professional guinea pigs scour the internet for ads from hospitals and universities looking for test subjects and spend from three days to over a month taking pills, receiving injections or watching TV. Kameron Bashi told McSweeney’s that it does get a little boring — “You can never leave; you’re stuck inside. It’s a cross between being in the hospital and being in jail” — but recommended the job for anyone who needs money and doesn’t want to lift a finger. As for consequences? “I’ve had some mild side effects,” he said. “I’ve been nauseous and I’ve vomited twice. Once I took a painkiller, which was an opiate, and I was constipated for a week. But I’ve never had anything really bad happen.”

Fringe Quality Testers
Products usually undergo extensive quality testing to determine their behavior in the wilds of consumers’ homes. To test the quality of pet food, Simon Allison, senior food technologist for Marks and Spencer in the U.K., chews a little bit of each kind of pet food that goes on the store’s shelves. There are also people who roll dice over and over again to ensure they are equally balanced, people who attempt to hack into companies on purpose to determine security flaws, and people who sit on furniture to make sure it’s as comfortable as possible. And those gross-out reality shows where people eat worms and other disgusting meals? Someone has to make sure those meals are safe for contestants.

Professional Sleeper
Perhaps you sit at your desk every day yawning, drinking a couple cups of coffee, struggling to stay awake. Why not turn your vice into your career? There is a small group of people who get paid to sleep. Typically, professional sleepers participate in university studies on sleep or dreams, but other snoozers make sure beds are comfortable. Also, WebUrbanist points to a 2009 art show at The New Museum of Contemporary Art where women were paid to catch z’s as part of a “living art” exhibition.

Fecal Archaeologist
Indiana Jones makes archaeology look exciting and dangerous in the movies, but we all understand that real archaeology involves lots of tedious study and archiving, in addition to difficult field work. All of this is made a little more uncomfortable if you consider the career of Karl Reinhard, professor of archaeology and paleopathology at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, who has made a career out of studying fossilized feces. By studying ancient excrement, Reinhard and his team can determine the eating habits of prehistoric people and the types of bacteria they were carrying.

Political Decoy
The movie Dave took advantage of the idea that a lookalike can fill in for a sick president and get government business done, but the idea is not without precedent. In 2008, Felix Dadaev revealed his work in the 1940s and ’50s acting as Joseph Stalin’s decoy. During World War II, Dadaev was groomed by Soviet secret police to copy Stalin’s mannerisms, voice and look in order to pose as the leader to throw off possible anti-Soviet spies. Even the leader was convinced: “He was stunned, then, after a pause, nodded his head approvingly,” Dadaev told The Daily Mail. Saddam Hussein’s son Uday also had a double: Latif Yahia spent years pretending to be the crueler of the Hussein sons, surviving a total of 11 assassination attempts against him. After Uday himself shot at Yahia in 1998, the lookalike escaped the country and told his story in a book, I Was Saddam’s Son.

Earlier

Snake Milking and 7 Other Odd Jobs

Laughter Therapist and 7 other Odd Jobs

Resources

Pathoecologist Karl Reinhard – Reconstructing History from the Bottom Up
Discover Magazine, November 2002

From Vomit Collectors to Worm Pickers: 13 Bizarre Jobs
WebUrbanist, Nov. 30, 2009

From Professional Sleeper to Ice-Cream Tester: Find Your Calling with a Crazy Career
by Hollie McKay
Fox News, April 23, 2007

Interviews with People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs: Kameron Bashi, Pharmaceutical Guinea Pig
by Suzanne Yeagley
McSweeney’s, Aug. 27, 2006

Drug Test Cowboys: The Secret World of Pharmaceutical Trial Subjects
by Josh McHugh
Wired.com, April 24, 2007

Breakfast with Frost: Interview with Latif Yahia
BBC News, June 15, 2003

The Man Who was Stalin’s Body Double Finally Tells His Story
by Will Stewart
The Daily Mail, April 12, 2008