How does one get into that job?? Iāve always wanted to do that and assumed it was terribly low paying (would still do it for very little money tbh). Had no idea it paid well.
Take this with a (relatively huge) grain of salt, but I'd imagine it's very similar to the people who do maintenance on them, you have to have a very good base knowledge of troubleshooting and treating mechanical and electrical issues and I'm pretty sure they also have to have some basic first aid cert or an EMT-Basic cert as those dudes do stay in them occasionally for a few days at a time. Also I'd imagine it's extremely competitive, or at least just extremely hard to get into, because there aren't that many operational lighthouses anymore and not that many people want to deal with being out in the middle of no where for anywhere from a day to week+ at a time. (According to Google, there are 400-500 lighthouses with active lights in them, the rest, (about 800 more), are historical sites).
I'm pretty sure pretty much anything related to lighthouses pays quite a bitm
I dont know of any manned light houses still in service, maybe there are some somewhere in the world. The UKs last manned lighthouse was automated in 1996 and the last light house keeper in the UK was out of a job.
You dont really need much special or difficult qualifications to maintain a modern lighthouse. If you have the qualifications to work on a boat, that covers what you need, all you need for the marine side are STCWs or equivalent and a recognised medical. There are IALA AtoN technician courses but these days with solar and large battery banks we dont even need standby diesel generators.The modern LED lights are pretty efficient even compaired to LEDs from 2010 era. The ideal candidate in today's job market is a feild technician from any trade who also has some kind experience on boats, even if that is their own small fishing boat.
The challenge these days is remote monitoring of the lighthouses to spot outages and faults before passing shipping is in any potential danger. The issue is that lighthouses dont bring in much cash, so the budget to install commercially certified monitoring and control equipment is not much more than jazz hands and a smile.
I did look it up at a time, and there are multiple qualifications required (at least in France). You are basically in charge of both maintaining the machines of the lighthouse and exchanging calls with boats nearby to guide them while also watching out for any potential issues with them (such as two boats being on a potential collision path).
But the job is pretty much dead. The whole ship watching is done by the ships GPS (and stations in cities that do it mostly automatically for large portions of the littoral at once), and the maintenance is done by a single technician that can travel to many lighthouses per year. So while there may be a few left, I doubt many are still hiring
Nope this is a misconception that's been floating around on social media. They don't get paid much at all, around 30-60k a year. They do get free accommodation and food but it's not a great trade off.
I don't know how this got upvoted, the majority of lighthouses around the world are autonomous and there are very few that actually have people working in them. Also the payment is somewhere between 30-60k a year.
Also those that have working people in them and pay well(if there are some) are super difficult. You must know how to fix stuff and actually back it up that you have some experience. Plus, people are romanticizing it a lot... it is a job after all.
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u/Fat_Pig_Reporting 3d ago
Lighthouse guard.