Toughest jobs in the UK include firefighters and paramedics
A poll of 2,000 adults found surgeons (44 per cent), police officers (34 per cent), and care workers (22 per cent) are also seen as roles only the iron-willed could take on.
Others said teachers (20 per cent) and social workers (18 per cent) do some of the most mentally taxing work out there day-in-day-out.
Six in 10 (62 per cent) want to see more recognition in the UK for those performing tough jobs – with 64 per cent believing they are vital to keeping the country running.
(Image: Dave Phillips/PinPep)
Others want them to get more credit because they involve working long hours with little rest (46 per cent) and facing hazardous conditions daily (62 per cent).
And in many cases, it involves working with dangerous people (55 per cent).
The study was commissioned by Samsung to launch their latest Rugged device range, which is designed to withstand the demands of challenging work environments.
The tech brand teamed up with TV farmer Amanda Owens to give an insight into the realities of working life on a farm – from mucking out and herding animals to operating machinery and navigating unpredictable weather.
She said: 'Farming isn't for the faint hearted – we're up before dawn, battling the elements, and it takes real resilience out here.
'In this environment, our tech needs to be just as tough – anything that can't handle water or a drop is a liability.
'We need something rugged on the outside, smart on the inside, that can keep up with the job.'
Almost half (46 per cent) of Brits admitted they don't feel like they have the resilience to take on a physically demanding role, a figure that dropped to 40 per cent among men.
In contrast, 52 per cent of women believe they have what it takes to handle roles that might require higher levels of emotional and mental capacity.
When it comes to younger generations, 61 per cent of those aged 18–24 have considered taking up physically tough roles when exploring career options.
This compares with just 11 per cent of Boomers, who prefer to steer clear of jobs they'd deem tough.
Nearly four in 10 (38 per cent) agree there's a misconception that physically demanding jobs don't require robust technology.
In fact, nine in 10 think devices capable of withstanding harsh conditions are essential to making these roles more manageable.
Many cited reducing physical strain through equipment (54 per cent), alerting workers to risks more quickly (53 per cent), and automating repetitive tasks (45 per cent) as effective ways to ease pressure.
Annika Bizon from Samsung UK & Ireland, makers of the Galaxy XCover7 Pro and Tab Active5 Pro Enterprise Edition, designed to take on tough environments, added: 'Tough roles demand robust support.
"Whether it's maintaining connectivity in the field or ensuring mission-critical tasks aren't interrupted, having the right tech in place is essential.
"The Rugged range has been engineered specifically for these environments — combining military-grade durability with the business tools workforces require.'
TOP 20 TOUGHEST EVERYDAY JOBS ACCORDING TO BRITS:
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Inside Ireland's unmarried mothers house of horrors - by historian whose discovery shocked the world: Church-run home 'didn't value illegitimate children', fed them 'bare minimum to survive' and 'dumped bodies in sewage system'
Tuam has come to embody Ireland's shame. For decades, mothers who had fallen pregnant outside of marriage were sent to the home to give birth and hand their newborns over to the church. The young women would stay for a year, working for the nuns who ran the institution, before being released once they had 'paid for their sin'. Many of their babies however, didn't make it out alive. Thousands of children died in Ireland's notorious mother and baby homes, a 2021 enquiry found. The deaths were hidden from the world, with residents in the quiet town north of Galway unaware for years that as many as 800 babies had been buried at their local home. 'It was always late in the evening when the burials took place. We never knew what was going on because you couldn't see over the high walls,' historian Catherine Corless, who first uncovered the scandal more than ten years ago, told MailOnline. A baby died almost every fortnight, Corless said, with a damning 1947 report finding that as many as a quarter of the child residents died in a single year. A recent state-backed commission found the home's residents lived in 'appalling physical conditions', lacking basic sanitary facilities such as running water. Corless said the children lived in cold, crowded conditions, and only received very limited food. 'It was pure neglect. They would just give them the bare minimum to keep them alive,' she said. The 1947 report also revealed a harrowing picture of life inside the home, with children suffering from malnutrition and in many cases being described as pot-bellied – a sign of starvation. 'They didn't care, the illegitimate children didn't matter,' Corless said, 'The final insult to the ones who died was that they placed them in that awful sewage system.' The children were buried at first in 'box coffins', but were later placed 'one on top of the other' in the chambers of a former sewage tank, Corless described. After a long battle by the local historian, survivors of the home and their families, the site is now being excavated, with many hoping it will finally bring Tuam's dark past into the open. Despite growing up in the town and even seeing some of the 'terrified-looking' children at her school when she was very young, Corless like many others thought it was just an orphanage, and that 'the good nuns were looking after all those orphans.' That was until she began her research in 2011, and discovered that a site many dismissed as a burial ground for famine victims was in fact the final resting place of some of the home's children. The mother and baby home, which was run by nuns from the Bon Secours order, was demolished long ago and is now the site of a housing estate and playground. In 2011, as Corless embarked on a study of the site, she was alerted to a small garden in the area being a possible burial site. A man who had lived nearby for many years told how his two-storey house allowed him and others to see over the walls. 'He lived in one of the older houses on the site, they knew that there were burials because the houses had two stories.' 'He mentioned to me: "There were burials there, did you not know that?" He said he believed they were of the home babies so he brought me over to the site where he thought they were. 'I couldn't believe it because there was no sign, no headstone, no plaque, absolutely no indication whatsoever there was anyone buried there. I got very curious.' Corless dug deeper, and soon found that those high walls concealed a litany of other horrors too. 'The toddlers were just left in rooms with no toys, no stimulation, they had nothing. They were just crying all the time,' she said. 'They had no nappies and would spend an awful lot of time sat on potties, which the mothers trained them to do from a very early age.' She said much of the childcare was left to the women, with only only five nuns running the home which housed as many as 300 babies at any one time. According to the 1947 report, 34 per cent of children died in the home in 1943, and more than one in four living in the home in 1946, far higher than the average mortality rate at the time. The home remained open for almost twenty more years after the report was published, while other mother and baby homes stayed open until as late as the 1990s. Speaking to the Irish Mail on Sunday in 2014, an 85-year-old woman who survived the home in Tuam described the conditions she faced. The woman, who gave her name only as Mary, spent four years in the home before being placed with a foster family. She said: 'I remember going into the home when I was about four. There was a massive hall in it and it was full of young kids running round and they were dirty and cold. 'There were well over 100 children in there and there were three or four nuns who minded us. 'The building was very old and we were let out the odd time, but at night the place was absolutely freezing with big stone walls. 'When we were eating it was in this big long hall and they gave us all this soup out of a big pot, which I remember very well. It was rotten to taste, but it was better than starving.' She recalled that the children were 'rarely washed', and often wore the same clothes for weeks at a time. 'We were filthy dirty. I remember one time when I soiled myself, the nuns ducked me down into a big cold bath and I never liked nuns after that.' Corless has also recalled her experience as a young girl encountering the 'home babies' when they attended her school in the late 1950s and early 60s. 'I remember the children would come down to the schools hand in hand, a mother at the front and a nun at the back of the line. 'They were brought to school later and left earlier than us because they were not allowed to mix with children from the town, not allowed to talk to them, not allowed to play with them.' She said she believes this was done so the children would not ask them about their lives in the home. 'I remember them being miserable and afraid,' she said of the children's physical appearance. 'They were very skinny, they always had sores of some sort, some of them would have diarrhoea in the classroom and they would have to bring them out. 'They were really impoverished and always pale. I still remember the terrified look on their faces. They were treated like a species apart from the rest of us.' As well as the children, the mothers who were shamed and forced into the home also faced mistreatment. 'They were horrific places,' Labour MP Liam Conlon, who has long advocated for justice for mother and baby home survivors, told MailOnline. 'I've met survivors from right across Ireland, some of them were in the homes in the 1950s and 60s and some as late as the 90s. He said the 'emotional and physical abuse' many experienced there 'has had a huge impact on every aspect of their lives,' even to this day. 'Women were used as unpaid labour, it was seen as part of their penance. It was often very heavy manual labour.' While the Tuam mothers worked for 'very meagre means', Corless said, 'money was not scarce' and the nuns were paid by the state for every mother and child they took in. 'The mothers did everything, there were lots of jobs to do and each mother had to stay there for a year, work hard and then leave their baby there. 'They didn't employ anyone from the town, and that's how they got away with it, because there was no one to report what was going on,' Corless said. 'By working there, the women were paying for their sin. It was horrific. The whole thing was a money racquet.' Conlon said the separation of mothers and their children also often left both deeply traumatised, with babies often 'taken off them very soon after birth, adopted abroad and never seen again.' He said he had also heard testimony from survivors of nuns being 'very cruel' and unsupportive when the women gave birth, with many believed to have died in labour. 'They weren't supported throughout childbirth complications, it was often seen as a judgement from God,' Conlon said. Annette Mckay, who now lives in Manchester, told Sky News how her mother Margaret O'Connor gave birth to a baby at the Tuam home in 1942 after being raped aged 17. Annette described some of the treatment Maggie endured while being forced to work in the home. 'My mother worked heavily pregnant, cleaning floors and a nun passing kicked my mother in the stomach.' The little girl died after just six months, with Annette saying her mother recalled how 'she was pegging washing out and a nun came up behind her and said 'the child of your sin is dead'.' She has welcomed the exhumation, saying it will hopefully, at long last, expose the home's dark secrets. 'When that place is opened, their dirty, ugly secret, it isn't a secret anymore. It's out there.' Now, with the excavation underway, Corless, the survivors and families of those lost are at last hopeful that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. 'It's absolutely wonderful it's got to this stage,' Corless said, sharing her approval of the team behind the dig, which is headed by Daniel Macsweeney who has vowed to get 'every little bone out of that soil.' 'It's in good hands, the director said they are focussing on the families first, and what they want,' she said. 'I hope this sends a very strong message to Ireland and the world that this can never be allowed to happen again.' The Bon Secours sisters who ran the home issued an apology and acknowledged that children were buried in a 'disrespectful and unacceptable way' in a 2021 statement. The order said it did 'not live up' to its Christian values in its running of the Co Galway facility between 1925 and 1961. The Irish government also issued an apology in 2021 over the mother and baby home scandal, calling it a 'dark and shameful chapter' in Irish history.
BBC News
20 hours ago
- BBC News
Fermanagh: Adults with learning disabilities graduate with qualifications
For many adults with a learning disability gaining a recognised qualification may seem out of reach, but that has not been the case for one group in County week 22 service users from Killadeas Day Centre were honoured for their achievements in animal care and gardening, hospitality and performing arts.A year of practical hands-on work, combined with written coursework means they will be receiving Level 1 qualifications from the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations & Assessment (CCEA) in gathered this week to celebrate their accomplishments with a graduation ceremony at Fermanagh Fun Farm in Lisbellaw – a social enterprise which helped make it possible. 'It's their turn' "They have achieved this qualification through hard work, through dedication," said Patricia Griffith from Killadeas Day Centre."They've been very committed to doing it. They've had the support of Alan and the team here at the farm and of daycare staff, but they've done it themselves."She said there was a "real sense of achievement in the air" at the graduation ceremony on Wednesday and everyone was very excited, especially as it took place during Learning Disability Week."If you consider that in the majority of their lifetime they will never achieve an accredited qualification or haven't done," she told BBC News NI."They've seen their brothers and sisters going off to college and university. They have attended graduations. And now it's their turn." Every week for the past year service users from the centre have been spending time at the help look after the animals, others have been developing their gardening skills, while a weekly community coffee morning has helped others gain experience in Christmas, they also wrote and performed their own nativity play with the rescue animals they care for co-starring. 'It's a long time coming' According to her mum, a year ago Clodagh was "afraid of everything", but now she is graduating with an Early Level Occupational Study award in performing Rooney, who is from Enniskillen, said the course has given the 46-year-old much more confidence, especially around animals. "She's far more outgoing. She didn't really like animals before and now she's with all the animals. "I believe there's a massive rooster in one of the sheds and she's in there on her own and potters about. "Unless I had seen it, I would hardly believe it. So this has been good for her."Margaret said Clodagh couldn't sleep the night before because she was so excited thinking about her graduation and what she would wear for the ceremony. "I said, you will have a lovely cap on you and you're going to have a lovely gown. 'That is beautiful, mummy. That is beautiful'".Margaret said the day was also very emotional for her."I had tears, because I was just saying, they have as much right to have their little graduation, to make them feel important, make them have their day."It's been a long time coming, and hopefully there'll be many more." A social enterprise is a business that aims to combine making profit with creating positive social or environmental impact for a local many social enterprises offer work placements to those with a disability, the unique aspect of the scheme in Lisbellaw is that those taking part finish with a Level 1 or 2 Occupational Studies qualification from CCEA, which is the equivalent of a reason they are able to do that is because the owner of Fermanagh Fun Farm, Alan Potters, is a former teacher and is able to grade their his grandparents and uncle passed away, his family farm was lying unused and he was inspired to transform it into a fun farm after a school trip to over 100 animals – most of which have been rescued – the project has grown in recent years and in June 2024 he sat down to plan how he could combine his former job with his current one. Not a gesture or a token "We never even imagined how successful it would be and to be standing here today with these young people getting into qualifications, it's just absolutely phenomenal."They are recognised qualifications, so it's not just a wee gesture or a token. It's something that can help them in the future," he said. "These are all life skills that they have now got and will be able to take with them."Mr Potters wants to continue the partnership and expand it in future, but said costs are a major issue because demand for funding is high."When it started off here, we had just two people in animal care, and now there's about 20 service users on site doing different projects. We want that to continue." Ms Griffith told BBC News NI the programme has improved the quality of life for the adults who have been involved."Their physical, their mental well-being, their confidence - they're walking taller."They're much, much more confident in everything they do, and they're proud of their achievements. That they should be. And as we are of them."
BreakingNews.ie
a day ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Person rushed to hospital after falling from cliff in Co Donegal
A person has been rushed to hospital after falling from a cliff in Co Donegal. The alarm was raised shortly after 7am when a member of the public heard calls for help at Cliff Fall at Bundoran's West End. Advertisement They immediately contacted the emergency services for help. Malin Head Coast Guard coordinated the response, tasking Bundoran RNLI, Donegal Fire Service, the National Ambulance Service, and the Sligo-based Coast Guard helicopter, Rescue 118 to the scene. Bundoran RNLI volunteers were paged at 7.25am and proceeded quickly to the scene. The casualty was located at the base of the cliff, having landed on rocks. Advertisement The RNLI crew at the scene managed to recover the casualty to the beach, where the helicopter had landed to assist. The casualty was then stabilised and airlifted by Rescue 118 before being transferred to Sligo General hospital for further treatment. The condition of the casualty is not known at this stage. Bundoran RNLI Lifeboat Operations Manager, Daimon Fergus, said 'We are grateful to the member of the public who raised the alarm this morning. "This was a challenging situation, and thanks to the swift response and teamwork between all agencies, the casualty was reached quickly and is now receiving the medical care they need. We wish them a full recovery.' The RNLI reminds anyone visiting the coast to stay well back from cliff edges, take extreme care near the water, and in an emergency, dial 999 or 112 and ask for the Coast Guard.
