Let's ditch the 'what do you want to do?' career advice

From an early age, young people are bombarded by adult pressure to know what they want to do for a career. And therein lies the problem. It's never one career, the world of work is changing too rapidly and most of those adults didn't know what they wanted at a similar age. Here are some thoughts on raising aspirations, career navigation, and emergent direction.

Research suggests that employer contact is the most useful source of career advice through visits to workplaces and work experience. Employers visiting schools to raise aspirations is also vitally important. But it doesn't always have to be the same old approach of bringing in the male, pale and stale from Boomer-land. Let's do more to inspire through peer-to-peer. Bring in recent alumni to schools and colleges to talk about how they got work, how they overcame barriers, how they are currently dealing with challenges, and what they are still learning. They will relate better to their experiences because they are more within reach, immediate and realistic. Young people are able to use the language and cultural references that resonate with their peers. 

This obsession with premature evaluation does no-one any favours. Yet, our education system reinforces young people's mental shackles by narrowing down choices at sixteen. We need to turn the funnel upside down to open up aspirations and possibilities.

Schools need a growth mindset, not a fixed one. No single careers adviser can ever be the font of all knowledge on careers information. Not in the Internet-age. Far better to empower young people by helping them to help themselves. Let's equip them with information-searching skills, develop their emotional intelligence and support them with coaching and mentoring. We all need to become more entrepreneurial, and that might mean creating our own jobs. Career navigation is a 21st Century skills-set in a VUCA world.

When I look back to my youth, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted, who I wanted to be or the direction I wanted to go. I entered the job market and bounced around aimlessly from job to job for a couple of years. I fell into roles and organisations that didn’t feel right. It took me years to recognise and forge a working identity that felt right. I wished I'd invested earlier in my self-awareness. 

Most people end up somewhere different or they did not foresee in their working lives. Two-thirds of today’s graduates don’t use their degrees in their jobs. Being a full-time paid employee is only one of several ways of living a fulfilling working life - freelancing, contracting, business-ownership, social enterprises, volunteering etc. Multiple roles in multiple careers, and flexibility for when and where you work. The workplace is no longer just a place you go to. 

Stuff happens in a working life because of change, chance, and choice. So young people would benefit from embracing uncertainty, having experiences to strengthen character and resilience, developing mental toughness to spot and seize opportunities in the face of adversity, and how to make decisions for themselves.

Rather than stress about what they are going to do for a career, young people would do better being purposeful to move forward and getting a sense of their purpose and direction. For example, their instincts might be to help people in need, to make a lot of money, or to create or build something. It’s not fully formed or necessarily specific. That instinct can be shaped by a combination of their personality, their values and beliefs, and their interaction with the world. Test and explore. Let things emerge through trial and error. Rather than following the vacuous advice of ‘follow your passion’, let passion find you. Rather than ‘be yourself’, become yourself. We know it when we feel it.

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David (@David_Shindler) is an independent coach, blogger and speaker, associate with several consultancies, founder of The Employability Hub (free resources for students and graduates), author of Learning to Leap: a guide to being more employable, Digital Bad Hair Daysand co-author with Mark Babbitt of 21 Century Internships (over 200,000 downloads worldwide). His commitment and energy are in promoting lifelong personal and professional development and in tackling youth unemployment. He works with young people and professionals in education and business.

To read more of his work - visit the Learning to Leap blog and download the app to receive his weekly blogs on your mobile (iTunes and Google Play).

And check out his other published articles on LinkedIn:

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