Exploring a Career with Animals
April, 10 2025If you love animals, it’s likely that at one point or another, you wondered if you could make a career out of taking care of animals. As it turns out, there are several paths to pursue if working with animals is of interest to you!
Occupations that involve animals span many different categories including management, business, and financial; health care; service; and farming, fishing, and forestry. These occupations have a wide range of education requirements, as well as wage possibilities.
What Types of Jobs Are Available?
The health care group of occupations includes veterinarians, veterinary technologists and technicians, and veterinary assistants. Veterinarians have the highest education requirement, because it requires earning a doctoral degree. Vet techs and vet assistants have lower requirements for entry-level jobs, with many vet techs requiring an associate’s degree and vet assistants needing a high school diploma or equivalent. Each of these occupations is projected to grow more than 20% by 2033, with almost 1,000 total openings in each occupation.
Animal control workers, animal caretakers, and animal trainers fall into the service occupation group. These occupations tend to have lower education requirements, with workers usually needing a high school diploma or equivalent. There will be substantial growth in these occupations, with animal trainers growing over 9% by 2033 and animal caretakers growing about 14% in the same time period.
There are also occupations like zoologists and wildlife biologists, animal breeders, farmworkers, and farmers and ranchers. Zoologists and wildlife biologists typically need at least a bachelor’s degree to enter this career, while the other occupations have lower educational requirements for typical entry-level jobs. The growth rate for each of these occupations varies widely. Zoologists and wildlife biologists are projected to grow over 9% by 2033, while farmworkers are projected to grow by less than 1%.
Regardless of these varying growth rates over the next 10 years, there will be plenty of job openings. In addition to growth within each occupation which results in new jobs, there will also be replacement openings due to people retiring, making a major occupational change, or otherwise leaving the labor force. The total number of job openings over the next 10 years will amount to about 48,000, providing ample opportunities for new entrants.
Some occupations, like animal caretakers and farmworkers, are at the lower end of the wage spectrum, while occupations like veterinarians are at the higher end. Depending on how much training and education you receive after high school, you will have different occupational choices which in turn leads to different earnings potential. Check out our Wage Conversion Calculator to learn how much an hourly wage is annually, or vice versa.
What Have Job Postings Looked Like?
Over the past year, there have been about 3,300 job postings across many areas of Oregon for occupations working with animals, according to Lightcast data. Animal caretakers have had the highest number of job postings over the past year, followed by veterinary assistants and veterinary technologists and technicians. The fewest number of job postings have been for animal breeders and animal control workers.
Taking a closer look at these job postings, we can analyze the minimum education and experience requirements. This may align with what we see in our Projections data, or it may differ based on the state of the labor market. Generally, when there is a tighter labor market and employers have a harder time finding workers, if they can relax some of their requirements where safe to do so, there is a greater likelihood of filling those open positions.
The majority of job postings over the past year require a bachelor's degree or less, with nearly 60% requiring a high school diploma or equivalent. However, of the remaining 20% of job postings, most require a professional degree such as a Ph.D.
With strong expected growth over the next decade, as well as relatively low education requirements, there will be many opportunities for new entrants into careers working with animals. Explore what this career could look like for you, or share with your animal-loving friend!