Jessica Jackson was afraid of heights when she first started her job as a wind turbine service technician — now, she spends most of her days working 300 feet in the air.

Jackson, 37, is a technician at Vestas, a wind turbine manufacturer, in Bee County, Texas, and earns $73,000 per year.

Climbing the turbine tower “isn’t as scary as you’d think,” she tells CNBC Make It. The tallest turbine on the wind farm Jackson works on is about 350 feet above the ground. It takes her less than 10 minutes to get to the top.

“Once you’re up there, you get to see the best views: You’re watching birds fly, eagles, hawks,” she says. “You get to see planes fly by. You get to see as far as you can see. It’s beautiful.”

Jackson has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. The Labor Department reports that wind turbine service technicians have one of the highest rates of injury and illness of all occupations.

It’s also the fastest-growing job in the U.S., with employment in the sector expected to almost double over the next decade.

“Working in this field is hard, but it’s rewarding,” says Jackson. “I love what I’m doing, so it makes the job not seem like a job as much.”

Here’s how Jackson earns $73,000 a year as a wind turbine service technician in Texas.

Before she became a wind tech, Jackson was a stay-at-home mom for 10 years.

After she and her husband separated in 2019, when her youngest child started school full time the following year, Jackson decided to return to the workforce. But she was worried her opportunities — and earning potential — would be limited without a bachelor’s degree.

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She enrolled in college online part-time in 2017 but didn’t finish her bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the University of Arizona until 2022.

“Not having a college degree [yet] and being a single mom was hard,” says Jackson, who has four children between the ages of 10 and 21. “I was getting passed up for jobs that I had the experience and skills for only because I didn’t have that degree.”

Jackson’s ex-husband was working as a wind tech and recommended her for a job at Blattner Energy, a renewable energy contractor in northern Texas, installing tower wiring.

While you don’t need a bachelor’s degree to become a wind turbine service technician, some jobs might require you to complete a 2-year technical program or apprenticeship. Others, like Blattner Energy and Vestas, will provide on-the-job training for new hires.

Vestas’ training covers best practices for the turbine’s electrical equipment, technical procedures like bolt torque and tensioning as well as first aid and safety protocols.

Jackson quickly fell in love with the hands-on aspects of servicing the turbines, the quiet peace of working in the wind.

“It felt good knowing that when a turbine was fixed or ran more smoothly, you did that, just seeing the immediate results of your efforts,” she says.

Working in a field that aims to help the environment was another perk that attracted her to the job.

“Wind turbines produce clean energy that goes to a grid, which then powers your homes, businesses, cell phones, TVs .. it’s awesome,” says Jackson. “I tell my kids all the time: Do something you love, but also do something that helps others and helps the environment.”

That job introduced Jackson to Vestas, where she started working in February 2020.

Jackson gets to work at 7 a.m. and ends her shift by 5:30 p.m. She works five days a week.

Every day on the job is different but starts with a problem.

“What I’m working on changes every day depending on what error code, or problem with the turbine, you’re coming in to,” Jackson explains. “The wind turbines are smart, they’re basically computers and constantly communicating to us what is going on with them.”

Comparable to cars, wind turbines have sensitive electronic systems, generators, pumps and other critical components that are susceptible to freezing or breaking down. Jackson’s job is to inspect, maintain and repair such parts as needed to keep the turbines running and producing power.

Vestas has 66 turbines on the farm where Jackson works. She’s typically responsible for one turbine per shift, but some days, it could be several.

The hardest part of her job is the climb. Jackson has to scale a narrow, metal ladder inside the turbine and pull herself through a hatch at the top to access the turbine’s nacelle, which sits atop the tower and contains the machine’s main parts. It’s a vertical climb nearly 30 stories tall.

“Cutting any corners with safety could be the reason why I don’t go home that day,” says Jackson, who wears gloves, glasses, a helmet, harness and other protective equipment on the job. “Once you’re up there, you’re in your office and ready to work. Everything else is easier.“

She might have been scared of heights when she first started, but after practicing the same climb nearly every day, sometimes multiple times in the same afternoon, Jackson says she started to trust her equipment and “got a lot more comfortable climbing such high heights.”

Jackson plans to work as a wind turbine service technician until she retires in her 70s, if not sooner.

The job might be physically demanding, but Jackson says spending so much time outside on the farm — and climbing the towers — has helped her feel “stronger and healthier.”

She’s working toward getting promoted to a level-three technician at Vestas, a role that pays about $80,000 a year, then will train to become a lead technician after that, a role that pays about $100,000 a year.

“Having this job has given me financial stability and freedom, enabling me to afford activities that will make my children happy, like signing up for a basketball league, while still saving money every month,” she says.

As Jackson continues to climb the ranks in her career — both literally and figuratively — she hopes more women and non-degree holders will join her field.

“I’m extremely grateful for my job, I love what I do,” she adds. “If I was doing something else, I probably would not be as happy.”

Do you have a creative or nontraditional career path? We’d love to hear from you! Fill out this form to be considered for a future episode of “On the Job.”

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If you prefer hiking the Appalachian Mountains over lounging on coastal beaches, this year’s least-expensive state to retire may be a good fit for you.

For the second year in a row, West Virginia is the most affordable state for retirement in the U.S., according to financial services company Bankrate’s best and worst states for retirement report, which published last month.

The state’s affordability ranking comes from “a low cost of living, low property taxes and affordable homeowners insurance,” the report said. West Virginia is followed by Mississippi and Indiana, rounding out the top three.

Here are the 10 most affordable states in the U.S. for retirement, according to Bankrate:

The report’s data came from a variety of sources, including the Tax Foundation and the Council for Community and Economic Research.

On average, West Virginia’s cost of living is 9% lower than the rest of the country, according to RentCafe. Its housing costs are 20% lower than the national average and its effective property tax rate of 0.49% ranks among the lowest in the U.S., according to Bankrate.

The state will phase out state-level taxes on income from Social Security benefits by 2026, following a bill signed into law in March. Withdrawals from retirement accounts such as 401(k)s, IRAs or government pensions will still be taxable, but residents 65 and older can claim deductions up to $8,000 per person.

But West Virginia ranks middle-of-the-pack in Bankrate’s wellness scores, and dead last in quality and cost of health care. Residents face the second-highest average private health insurance premiums in the country, personal finance website MoneyGeek found last year.

It’s important to note that “most affordable” doesn’t necessarily equate to “best.” While a potential retirement destination’s affordability can be an important consideration, it shouldn’t be the only one.

For instance, you should consider what else a potential retirement location may have to offer, such as the availability of entertainment and community activities and accessibility of hospitals or other services you may need when you’re older.

“You might live somewhere that is beautiful, but maybe it’s very remote and the nearest hospital is an hour away,” Kerry Hannon, a retirement expert and author of “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work,” told Bankrate.

“You’re going to have to be helicoptered or transported to get to a medical center, so that should be an important consideration,” she added.

Before you decide where you’d like to spend your post-work years, its helpful to get an idea of how much money you’ll have by the time you retire. Once you have your retirement savings goal in mind, you can determine how far those dollars can stretch in different locations.

CNBC Make It’s retirement calculator can help you estimate how much you’ll need to retire comfortably based on factors like your age, how much you already have saved for retirement, your income and the age you wish to retire.

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My family is from the Greek island of Ikaria, a Blue Zone renowned for the longevity of its inhabitants. To us, garlic has long been more than “just” an ingredient. 

Garlic is one of the defining components of the Mediterranean diet. I use it every day at almost every meal when I cook for myself or my family. During the weeks I run my cooking classes on the island, we use so much of it that one of my kitchen assistants takes half a dozen or so heads of garlic home with her each night to peel and store in water for the following day. 

Modern-day Ikarians swear by garlic as folk medicine, too. Many of my garlic lessons come from an old family friend, Yiorgos Stenos, a spry beekeeper in his 90s. He lives and eats the way Ikarians of yore always have: simply, with gentle exercise and purpose. He still works! And he turns to nature as the first resort for most ailments. 

From him I learned of the old Ikarian remedy, an infusion of sage, mountain tea, pine honey, and garlic that, as he put it, “was the ‘penicillin’ of my generation.” He grew up making this infusion either as preventative medicine or at the onset of a cold. “It kept us healthy all winter long back then,” he says. 

Science has caught up with the empirical wisdom of country folk medicine. The stinking rose has several health and longevity benefits, research shows. Garlic can help boost our immune system, for example, and lower blood pressure. 

Luckily, garlic makes almost anything taste better. It’s in the vast majority of the recipes in my most recent book, “The Ikaria Way,” and I can’t imagine life without it. 

Here are a few of my favorite ways to use garlic in the kitchen:

Skordalia is a Greek classic consumed with unabashed pleasure on Ikaria. It’s a garlic spread that belongs to the litany of great Mediterranean garlic spreads, such as pistou and aioli, like my Greek-mustard aioli. 

On Ikaria, we make skordalia with either bread or potato as the base, plus lots of garlic, sea salt, lemon juice or vinegar, and extra virgin Greek olive oil. I like to make mine with stale sourdough and sometimes sprinkle crushed or chopped nuts or seeds on top. 

This dip pairs particularly well with crispy fried or baked vegetable fritters as well as fried fish, especially cod.

Garlic can star in your salad dressings. Sometimes I grate it, like in my mixed fresh and dried three-bean salad recipe. I then add it to apple cider vinegar, honey, olive oil, dill, and salt and pepper. 

I take a different approach in my kale and Greek yogurt version of a classic Caeser salad. I make a paste out of garlic with anchovy in the food processor and add yogurt, mustard, and lemon juice before tossing it with kale and chickpeas. 

It’s a key ingredient in my recipe for kale with olive oil, oranges, and garlic, inspired by a traditional food from the Mani region of Greece. I cook the kale in soft garlic to infuse its flavor into the dish, which can be served hot, warm, or at room temperature.

Countless plant-based recipes on the island call for garlic, some traditional and some contemporary. 

Green bean stew with garlic, which is great as a main course, is a popular recipe all over Greece and on Ikaria as well. Another green bean stew recipe with corn, called mageirio, is traditional on the island and similarly calls for a generous amount of garlic. 

The most popular and traditional vegetable dish on Ikaria is called soufico, an adaptable stew or casserole made seasonally with different vegetables. It typically includes eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, and potatoes, and in winter sometimes sweet potatoes and butternut squash. No matter the variation, it always calls for garlic. 

Garlic has inspired newer veg-forward creations, like my recipe for chicory greens sizzled with olive oil, garlic, ginger, and hot pepper flakes. 

You can make an easy dinner in under half an hour by introducing pasta into the vegetable-and-garlic mix. 

Some of my favorite iterations include: 

• Garlicky broccoli spaghetti, which uses six (yes, six) cloves of garlic as a flavor enhancer in a simple dish.
• Skordomakaronada, or crunchy garlic-rusk pasta, a rustic and traditional Greek pasta dish that uses slivered garlic cooked in olive oil, combined with grated tomatoes and topped with crushed barley rusks. The garlic adds depth to the tomato sauce, making it a hearty vegetarian option.
• Pasta tossed with Greek yogurt and herbs, which features minced garlic sautéed with onions and mixed with pasta, Greek yogurt, and fresh herbs of your choice, such as rosemary parsley, oregano, marjoram, basil, mint, fennel, and/or thyme. The garlic contributes to the overall flavor profile, creating a creamy and tangy dish.

Garlic is integral to cooking the main Ikarian animal protein, goat. One of my favorite ways to do that is in a lemony goat stew with blackened garlic, which you can replace with traditional cloves.

Historically, Ikarians ate meat only once in a while. This stew is perfect to enjoy on a Sunday or for a festive occasion, as Ikarians have been doing for generations. 

Diane Kochilas is the host and co-executive producer of ”My Greek Table,” runs the Glorious Greek Cooking School on her native island Ikaria, and is the author of 18 books on Greek cuisine, including most recently, ”The Ikaria Way: 100 Delicious Plant-Based Recipes Inspired by My Homeland, the Greek Island of Longevity.”

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The foods in your daily diet play a major role in how healthy you are and how long a life you live. In fact, one of the key practices of people living in blue zones is eating a diet of mostly plant-based foods of fruits, vegetables and nuts.

In past interviews with CNBC Make It and other publications, many centenarians credited their diet for living a long, healthy life.

Here’s what four people, ages 99 and older say they always eat and also what they never do.

Elizabeth Francis, the oldest living person in the U.S. who is 115 years old, told ABC 13, that she eats “everything.”

But Francis “always grew her vegetables in the backyard. I never saw her go to a fast food restaurant as much like Chick-fil-A and all the places I liked to go. She never did that,” her granddaughter, Ethel Harrison, told TODAY.com.

Francis has also never smoked and doesn’t drink alcohol, Harrison noted.

At 102 years old, Deborah Szekely still helps to run her fitness resort and spa three times a week. Szekely has followed a mainly plant-based diet since her childhood.

“I’m a pescatarian. And I actually have been fortunate of never eating meat because of my parents,” she told Make It.

Her typical breakfast, lunch and dinner looks like:

• Breakfast: Yogurt, a banana and whole grains.
• Lunch: Salad at home, she said, or lunch at restaurants.
• Dinner: A meal of fish, salad and a baked potato or she tries something new.

Her diet is very similar to the Mediterranean diet, and it includes fish, whole grains and fruits and vegetables.

Shirley Hodes, who was 106 years old when she spoke to Make It in March of last year, said she aims to limit the animal fat that she consumes and only drinks skim milk.

“I did like to eat a simple, balanced diet without too much sweets,” Hodes said. She was adhering to the guidelines she was taught in the Red Cross nutrition course she took during the Second World War.

When Forbes spoke to Daisy McFadden in 2010, she was 99 years old. She shared what she usually ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Her meals usually included:

• Breakfast: Oatmeal, cranberry juice and a banana.
• Lunch: Salad with beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and chicken or fish
• Dinner: Lean meat and steamed vegetables
• Dessert: Fresh fruit

“I don’t drink soda at all, and never have,” McFadden told Forbes. She drank water, juice, milk or iced tea instead.

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Ambitious workers get a lot of advice early in their career about how to get ahead. One common tip is: Be among the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave to show your boss you’re committed to the job.

Brianna Doe used to feel that way. When the marketing professional began her career about a decade ago, she’d often clock into the office early and work long hours “to show that I have the drive and the motivation, and that I want to grow within the company.”

Doe was eager to show her manager and people outside her department that she could “go above and beyond,” and she felt “a great way to do that is by being the first one to show up and the last one to leave,” Doe tells CNBC Make It.

That being said, “I also experienced such intense cycles of burnout by doing that.”

Looking back, Doe recognizes that the well-intentioned advice often comes with the caveat that working long hours shows your dedication to your work at the expense of your personal time and life.

“I didn’t have any sort of work-life harmony in my life,” says Doe, who now runs her own marketing agency, Verbatim. These days, she says, “I do believe that’s an outdated take, especially now that we’ve ushered in this new era of setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health.”

Stacie Haller, chief career advisor at ResumeBuilder with over 30 years of recruiting experience, agrees.

“I think people are savvy these days enough to know that just because you sit in the office eight hours a day doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a productive employee,” she says.

Instead, there are plenty of other ways to use your time to show you’re excited about your job and want to grow.

“Establish relationships, find a mentor, get to know a team,” Haller says. “Observe the successful people, see how they work and operate, and ask for advice.”

Gen Z workers, in particular, are in a good position to prioritize building work relationships that can help them years down the line, Haller says: “That’s what you should be doing in the office. Don’t focus on getting there early and staying late just to make believe you’re a hard worker. That is not going to cut it.”

That message also has to come from the top. Doe believes bosses should re-assess their expectations if they’re focused on an employee’s time spent at their desk rather than what they’re completing or how they’re expressing their ambition.

“If your new employee is doing great work, and they ask you for more opportunities and want to be on different projects, that should speak more volumes than somebody who just stays later than you,” she says.

All of this being said, Haller adds that it’s important to follow your team’s lead in terms of when to show up and when to leave the workplace.

Adhere to the culture: Be on time, don’t be late, don’t miss meetings and “don’t have lame excuses,” Haller says.

Ultimately, she says, “If everybody’s there 8:30 to 6, be there 8:30 to 6. But if you’re showing up at 7 just to make some point to nobody but yourself, that’s a little crazy.”

Want to stop worrying about money? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course Achieve Financial Wellness: Be Happier, Wealthier & More Financially Secure. We’ll teach you the psychology of money, how to manage stress and create healthy habits, and simple ways to boost your savings, get out of debt and invest for the future. Start today and use code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off through September 2, 2024.

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