PR Job Outlook:

While the job market for PR has in the last few years been on the sluggish side, the rest of the decade is quite promising for a PR career. The latest issue of Fortune (March 21) features "Hot Careers for the Next 10 Years," listing the 20 Fastest-Growing Professional Jobs. (PR lands in the eighth slot.) To come up with the list, Fortune took Bureau of Labor Statistics projections from 2002 to 2012, then eliminated blue-collar and relatively "uncommon jobs," or jobs that employed fewer than 1,000 or so people nationwide in 2004. Here's how PR stacks up against some other "hot" careers:

Fastest-Growing Professional Jobs - Better Than 20% (sample)

• Environmental engineers: 54.3%
• Personal financial advisors: 36.3%
• Biomedical engineers: 27.8%
• PR specialists: 27.8%
• Systems analysts: 24.9%
• Marketing and sales managers: 21.3%
• Media and communications specialists: 20.4%
• Lawyers: 20.4%