A plea to start earlier

We treat career choice as something which starts at the age of 15 or 16.

Like that’s the point at which you turn up, as a blank slate, and get to pick a career from a catalogue. In fact, we actually have catalogues, and we have profiles that can help if you’re not quite sure what to pick, they’ll help you.

And this makes sense, because the world of career development is a grown-up world – it’s a world for adults, serious people who want to talk about productivity and engagement and policy, and there’s no room for infants and toddlers or child development in this space.

So we act as if a whole heap of 15 and 16 year olds turn up each year at the same time and we treat them as if they know nothing about any careers, and they come with no preconceived ideas or preferences, but they are going to pick, as if from a hat, and that’ll be it.

The reality is that it’s more like a scene from Masterchef, when the room is full of cloches and you have no idea what’s under any of them but you have to pick? It’s always fascinating to see the different methods people use to pick with literally no idea what they’re selecting – some of them try to smell the cloches, some of them try to work out if one cloche is bigger than the other. Some use logic and try to get inside the producer’s mind to work out where the good stuff might be, others use maths and pick closest cloche, and some use superstition and pick their lucky number cloche.

Even if we have no idea what we’re picking, we still bring our past experiences, ideas, and ways of thinking to the selection process.

Most of the studies that do delve into childhood career development will try to work out things like ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’, and ‘who influenced you’, which is a start, but it doesn’t really help us. Knowing that the vast majority of kids want to go into one of only 10 or so professions is scary, but unless we look at why this is happening there isn’t much we can do about it.

Because these kinds of decisions don’t just start at 15 or 16 years old. It’s not a case of just teaching them about more careers at that age (which we don’t really do, by the way), because by this point they’ve probably already made up their mind to a large degree.

And pretending like little kids can’t handle more than 10 or so careers is another cop out – of course they can. There’s more diversity in preferences for ice cream flavour than there is for career choice.

No kid turns up at 15 years old as a blank slate.

They’ve been the product of their upbringing, whether that was full of piano lessons and after school sports, or suspension and neglect. Their understanding of themselves, and the knowledge they have about the options come with them to the table.

And if we want to have any impact on the quality of the decisions they make, and the quality of the careers they build, then we need to work out what they bring, why they bring it, and how we can improve it, regardless of the school they attend or the post code they grow up in.