White collar jobs are often associated with management professions throughout the world. Many jobs are still defined by their dress code, which is the traditional work shirt worn by the employees who perform them. Blue work shirts and blue overalls are associated with workers who mainly perform manual labor or hands-on work. Teaching or secretarial jobs that are conventionally held by women are thought of as pink collar jobs. Clerical, managerial or sales jobs are typically associated with a white collar, the attire being a traditional white button-down dress shirt with a tie. As technology progresses, there is a shift of the blue collar workers to the white.
A white collar worker may be an hourly employee or a salaried professional. This could mean he or she may have a larger share of responsibilities and may have to work longer hours than a blue collar worker. The fact that a worker is wearing a blue collar, does not absolve him from performing manual labor, as and when the situation demands. Other white collar jobs include advertising or customer service, accounting, sales, attorneys and doctors. Clerical workers and managers are mostly encouraged to wear a formal white dress shirt to enhance their professional appearance to clients and to distinguish them from the blue collar jobs they supervise.
There are different types of white collar jobs, and they can vary from a clerical worker to the more educated worker, including desk jobs and several high-paying jobs. A commercial lending director is one such educated worker, and is one of the most high-paying jobs among the white collar workers. Someone working in this capacity generally oversees the portfolio of loans in banks, and administers the commercial lending activity. Another high-paying job is a general manager, who monitors the operations in an organization. General managers in the distribution and manufacturing sectors earn the most, where they oversee the day-to-day activities of all the departments, and formulate long term policies.
Other high-paying jobs considered to be white collar could be the engineering or finance directors. An engineering director has to oversee the selection and use of various types of technology and engineering machinery within an organization. Engineering directors working in the services sector earn the most. Likewise, finance directors working for the utilities sector earn the most because they have to oversee and control the finance sector of the organization. Their role may be to oversee the budgets, audit and accounting departments, together with financial forecasts and preparation of financial reports for the organization.
Finance controllers, accounting directors, and sales managers are other white collar jobs that are held by the salaried professional and are high-paying jobs. These high earners are mostly in organizations in the financial or the utilities sectors. They oversee, control and manage the finance, accounts and the sales departments of their organizations respectively.
