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Teenagers and Career Choices

I still remember a talk from the “careers teacher” when I was at school, back in the 1970’s. I remember, also, being somewhat sceptical when he claimed that his small, plastic box of index cards contained information about all the known careers that might be open to us. Things have moved on a lot since then, many schools have career guidance specialists on their staff, but the explosion of career opportunities may well mean that today’s teenagers are as ill-informed about the range of possibilities available to them as I consider myself to have been all those years ago.

For today’s teenagers, however, the picture is considerably more confusing than it would have been for teenagers even just a few years ago. The annually increasing pace of technological change has had an enormous impact, and the emergence of increasingly able robots will ensure the pace of change continues to accelerate. This will mean that many current jobs will no longer exist by the time today’s younger teenagers enter the workforce, and many of the careers/jobs upon which today’s teenagers will embark do not even exist at the current time.

Projections concerning the future of employment indicate that today’s teenagers are far less likely to enter lifelong careers than many did in the past. They are likely to work much more in a series of project-based jobs in a kind of portfolio career. This will require the development of new skills and will heighten the importance of resilience. It will also increase the need for retraining at points of transition. Whilst the jobs may change fairly regularly, however, the general area within which a person works seems likely to remain generally consistent. For many teenagers, the choice of a career path will be about setting this general direction.

Advice for parents

Be aware of the following:

  • The world of work has changed considerably since you first entered it. Legal requirements, employer/employee expectations and responsibilities, workplace culture and practices have all changed since you first entered the world of work, resulting in a very different environment for today’s teenager. Recruitment practices and educational expectations have changed too, so make sure the advice you give to your teenager is based on up-to-date knowledge rather than out-of-date personal experiences.
  • Your teenager is a unique individual. Perhaps the biggest mistake a parent can make in the area of career choices is to assume that their teenager will follow in the footsteps of their parent. This simply does not follow automatically, and parents who set out to force their teenagers into their own mould can end up creating years of sadness and resentment in their children. A similar mistake occurs if parents see their children as channels through which they can seek vicariously to live out their own unfulfilled dreams. Your teenager is a unique individual with enormous potential, and it is the role of parents to be helpers to their teenagers in finding the best way for their potential to be realised both for their own good and for that of society.
  • University is not necessarily the best route into a career. For an increasing number of teenagers, a university or college education has come to be seen almost as a rite of passage. For many, it is a good choice; but for others, there are alternative routes that may serve them better as part of their preparation for the future.

Help your teenager discover what is best for them. Reasons that teenagers find it difficult to determine their future path vary enormously. The chosen career direction is laden with life-shaping potential, so it is well worth investing time and resources into making the choice a well-informed one. The teenager’s character, strengths and desires are all important factors. Put simply: some are better suited to some careers than others. As your teenager forms ideas about the direction they may wish to go, encourage them to find some kind of work experience that will help them discover what their potential career path may be like. Voluntary involvement is possible in some career areas; holiday internships might be possible in others; opportunities to meet people from various careers and, if possible, to visit them in their workplace – all these can be useful in helping them gain the insights that will lead to well-informed choices. Through it all, ask questions about their thoughts and experiences to help them clarify their thinking. Get them to explain why they think a particular career is for them. Listen carefully to what they say, challenge their assumptions, suggest a few alternatives they might like to check out, but avoid telling them what to do. Ultimately, their chosen career direction might be one of the most far-reaching decisions they will ever make, so it is important that it is their decision.

Advice for teachers and schools

Help teenagers appreciate a range of opportunities. One of the dangers for teenagers when trying to figure out their career direction is that they simply “fall into” one of the first areas they come across. This can, of course, work out well for some; but for others, it may lead to a lifetime of “If only I’d known …” statements and a persistent feeling of a lack of fulfilment. Schools have an important role in helping teenagers come to an understanding of at least some of the vast range of career opportunities that exist in today’s world. Schools use a variety of approaches, including work placements, vocational discovery programmes, career fairs, etc. Whatever approaches are used, it is important that they are sufficiently varied to be able to inspire interest in a diverse range of students. In this area, schools working cooperatively (for example, across a city) could represent a way of providing a wider range of insights into career opportunities than any one school can hope to provide when operating alone.

Preparation of students for the future is an important focus. The rapidly changing nature of modern society brings new challenges to the schools and teachers of today. If predictions are correct that today’s teenagers are likely to face frequent career changes during their working lives, then adaptability, innovation and resilience will grow in importance. More than ever before, schools need to be looking at ways to ensure their programmes help develop the “people” of the future as well as providing the academic foundations upon which future knowledge developments can take place. The likely need for periodic re-training during the working lives of current teenagers means that education will need to be seen as a lifelong pursuit much more than it is currently. To that end, teachers who can excite students about education and ignite in them a genuine desire for discovery and learning are providing an invaluable preparation for the future, whatever form it may ultimately take.

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Using Extended Adolescence Creatively

Adolescence, the period of life between childhood and adulthood, is popularly defined as beginning with puberty and ending with social and financial independence. On this basis, adolescence can begin as early as ten years old (in girls especially) and continue into the mid-twenties. This means that, as Professeur Laurence Steinberg points out, “… adolescence is three times as long as it was in the 19th Century and … twice as long as it was in the 1950s.”

A host of factors are thought to have contributed to this trend of lengthening adolescence. Within Western society, the increased occurrence of child obesity is frequently suggested as a possible contributor to the earlier onset of puberty, but there is no real consensus that this is the only, or even the major, contributing factor. At the same time, people are generally living longer and this, in turn, has lessened the pressure for adolescents to become financial contributors within the family, a powerful propellant towards adulthood for earlier generations of young people. A lack of affordable housing for young people has increased the financial pressure for many to stay within the parental home, further delaying the move towards financial and social independence.

As adolescence has lengthened, there has been more emphasis on the need for enhanced educational qualifications, which has seen a large increase in the proportion of teenagers attending university or college, increasingly to pursue both Bachelor and Masters degrees in the quest to secure the level of job that might bring about their elusive financial independence. Additionally, the ageing nature of the population has led to more people remaining in the workforce for longer and for societal power to be focused increasingly in the hands of the older generations, often robbing adolescents, in the process, of the opportunity to enter and rise within the world of work. Governments, anxious both to control the number of younger people included in jobless statistics and to manage the affordability of caring for an increasingly elderly population, have colluded in the development of these societal trends.

Breaking out

I have referred already to the increase in the number of teenagers and those in their early twenties who are engaged in college or university education. For some, this provides an opportunity to experience a more independent lifestyle outside the family home for at least part of the year. However, increased financial pressures on families and on student funding has led to more students attending a local college or university so that they can continue to live at home and so keep costs down. Even for those who live away from home in student accommodation, there remains the question of what happens after the completion of their educational course(s), and for those who do not immediately secure a place in the world of work, there is often the prospect of returning to the family home as a matter of financial necessity. Additionally, those able to find training within the workplace, often find that apprenticeships and internships provide insufficient financial reward for them to do other than continue living in the parental home.

It has been interesting over the past decade to see the emergence of what might be termed “star value” as a route towards independence. Some families invest heavily in a particular sport in the hope that their teenager will emerge into sporting stardom and so become independent. It was particularly interesting recently to witness the large proportion of teenage participants in the Winter Olympics. These young people represent the top few percent of those involved in the pursuit of sporting stardom, those who might make it, but there are many more whose years of training and commitment do not yield anything like the return of the initial investment, let alone a route to financial independence. Similarly, the rise of a plethora of talent shows might provide a route to independence for a few, but for most, such speculative routes to independence will provide little more than heartbreak.

Brain research has made considerable advances in recent years and, as well as providing valuable insights into a number of aspects of teenage behaviour, has shown that the full development of the adult brain is not complete until the mid-twenties. However, rather than simply seeing this as providing unqualified support for the delay of adulthood outlined above, I believe we should ask how we can create the optimum conditions for teenagers and those in their early twenties to gain from the period of increased brain elasticity and so to maximise the development of their potential for the future.

Advice for parents

There was about a decade between the departure to university of our oldest and youngest children, and one feature of their relative experiences during the first year at university underlined for me how society had changed in the intervening period. Our eldest experienced weekends at university as a time for relaxation and socializing, much as I remember my own experience at university. Ten years on, our youngest had a different experience due to the large number of students who spent virtually every weekend at home, only to return on Sunday evening, often with a pile of Tupperware boxes containing pre-cooked meals for the entire week ahead! Whilst I suspect parents were seeking to lessen the pressures on their teenagers, such a pattern of student life robbed them of the opportunity to take an important step towards independent living! To me it spoke more than a little of parent concern at the level of pressure on teenagers in today’s world but also of parental insecurity about the move of their teenagers towards independence.

Create a structure for letting go. Starting in the early teenage years, I recommend parents negotiate with their teenagers a structure for letting them go. Through the years of adolescence, there needs to be a staged process of allowing teenagers increased social and financial independence, within which they can experience increasing independence and carry more responsibility for their own lifestyle, choices and decisions. If their ultimate attainment of social and financial independence is delayed as outlined above, then a strategic approach to increased responsibility at home could allow them to assume responsibility for the administration and running of areas of the family home. This may not be the complete social and financial independence they require to bring their adolescence to a conclusion but it could represent a meaningful experience of independence within other constraints that are beyond the control of the family.

Advice for Teachers and Schools

Seek to promote real student independence. There are many different aspects to education, some of which are more in vogue than others at any given time. In the context of this post, I would appeal to those involved in education to make the promotion of real student independence a priority. This can take a myriad of forms and each school will want to consider their own context before developing their approach to this area of education. As stressed in the advice to parents above, there needs to be an approach that develops from year to year so that students can grow in their sense of independence as they move up through the school. Many schools already have forms of student government within their structure, though sometimes I fear this is more for the sake of appearances than for the development of real responsibility. I would encourage in the first instance the establishment of a working group of students with one or two carefully-chosen adult advisors at the most. Give such a group the task of planning how the school can best encourage the development of real student independence, and see what they come up with. Once the ideas have been formulated, let the students drive the implementation, deliver the programme, advertise the opportunities across the school, report on their progress to the Board. In short, let it be their programme and their responsibility. I would love to hear how it goes!

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