Do you remember what careers advice you got at school? I do and I wasn’t impressed. Sadly, careers advice for students doesn’t seem to have changed much either. The advice, if you can call it that, is still gendered and based on old hierarchies. I have an almost seventeen year old daughter and a twenty year old brother. Chloe is doing her A Levels and Sam is in his final year of sports science degree. Neither know what they want to be when they grow up.
There are career days for older students, where students can sign up for talks. The idea being the students would be inspired and learn what is needed for different careers. Yet the speakers would often be from a local supermarket, the army, a health / caring agency and a few randoms thrown in. Careers day was hardly inspiring and instead it played out the age old stereotypes. Girls would be expected to attend the care or hairdressing talks, boys the army or engineering. Both would be taught that they would be workers, that they would work for others.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
When I was at school, my careers advice consisted of filling in a questionnaire which would then suggest my future career options. A childcare worker was my top recommendation. Nevermind that I wanted to be a journalist or a children’s storybook writer, and politics interested me too. Although I loved debating and putting an argument forward, that was never mentioned, it never came up in my suggested careers. I never heard about self-employed workers, about entrepreneurs and business owners. We were never taught to aim that high. I was never told it was ok to want to earn lots of money. Schools should be telling our children those things. If we don’t tell them who will? We want to be encouraging a generation, building them up because that is what the UK needs.
In time I graduated and fell into teaching,I was a good teacher, my students respected me and they got great results if they followed my advice! I lasted 12 years before leaving teaching, I left because it didn’t fit with family life. I have now realised my dream and my first book Blogging Your Way To Riches will be available from December 1st via the website or Amazon.
Careers advice is still lacking.
I want to tell students to aim high, really high. I tell my children to look at all their options and that they can work for whatever they want. My school didn’t tell me that. Careers advice is still lacking in most secondary schools. I don’t want my children to be told the same old options I was told. There are so many fab jobs out there and so many growing industries. There is bound to be something to capture the imagination of young people. It is time for a different approach in our schools we need to move from formulas that suggest jobs to life coaching. Where do people want to end up? what’s important to them? Thankfully we live in a time where we can have portfolio careers, where we can change our directions, where we can retrain.
I get inspired when I see people that I went to school with, those who left at the first opportunity, but are now doing degrees. I get inspired when I hear that some of my old students are in jobs they love and they thank me for inspiring them. It makes me realise that we can all achieve more.
I just hope that the secondary schools catch up soon and that careers advice improves. How did you decide what you wanted to be when you grow up?
4 Responses
It wasn’t until college that I realised that I wanted to write. At school I did work experience at another school in a very stereotypical fashion. I think I just went for a career path that I thought I understood because I had been on the receiving end and respected my teachers. I had no idea of all the opportunities there were out there until I was post -16. I hope things will have changed by the time my girls start thinking about how they would like to earn a living. It’s strange, as Mr TB and I were discussing this earlier. We both went to uni but would not push our girls to do the same. Vocational studies in an area they enjoy might just get them where they want to be (and earning) sooner! x
It has been a long time since I was at school and back then careers advice was given to you by a random teacher. Mine was a geography teacher. I always wanted to be a fashion designer. But I was never given options or what if it didn’t work out. I got accepted, but didn’t want to go in the end. It wasn’t until I was almost 20 I went to college to study software development. I had thought things had changed. xx
I was lucky that I always KNEW what I wanted to do – and even though teaching was a relatively common career path I still didn’t get great advice. I was told I HAD to do A Level history as I needed a curriculum subject at A Level. Well guess what, I failed it. Completely. Still a teacher though . . .
I had no idea what I wanted to do. At school, I was one of those kids that was good at everything, because of that I lacked focus. My A-levels were broad rather than specialist, but I was adamant I was doing Communication Studies even though I had no clue why. Careers advice was rubbish. Because I was top of the class, the teachers kept telling me to go to uni, but that was about the extent of it. No-one gave me any suggestions of why I should be at uni, and what it could lead to. They had so few students go to uni from our school that they couldn’t really even give me any examples to follow.
I left college with no intention of going to uni when I didn’t know what I wanted to be, or what degree I wanted to do – I toyed with doing Media Studies but with zero opportunity and no knowledge of how to carve a career in media, that plan soon went out of the window. I got an apprenticeship in printing through my skills in maths. It did me very well for a while. Print was a great industry to be in, though it’s changed so much in the last decade.
I went back to Uni at 26 and did Economics and Geography – two subjects I hadn’t touched at A-Level, and then a Masters in Anthropology (never even heard of this at the age of 16, or 18). I now blog and run a social media consultancy – an industry that wasn’t even possible in the 1990s! If you’d told me at 18 to go to uni and study media and that it could take me anywhere I wanted, I would have thought you were crazy, but there you are, and here I am.
Agree, careers advice is rubbish. Lack of aspiration is a real problem, and I think a lot of it is to do with the teachers themselves, who often lack knowledge of the range of careers available. Careers advisors are all well and good but they see students so little that their job is much more difficult. A careers advisor would have looked at my skills in maths and suggested I be an accountant.