Teenagers' "Mismatched" Job Ambitions

There is a "massive mismatch" between young people's career expectations and the reality of the jobs available, a major survey of teenagers suggests.

It highlights the need for better careers advice, says Nick Chambers, director of the Education and Employers Taskforce, which published the survey.

The study also indicates teenagers have a very weak understanding of potential earnings for different types of jobs.

There is a serious "information gap" for teenagers, says Mr Chambers.

Confederation of British Industry president Sir Roger Carr said the report showed industry had to do more to show young people the "requirements and opportunities" of the world of work.

The study, based on a survey of 11,000 13- to 16-year-olds, is an attempt to map the job ambitions of teenagers against the employment market up to 2020.

It shows teenagers have a weak grasp of the availability of jobs - and that large numbers will be aiming for jobs that are in short supply.

For instance, there are 10 times as many people aiming for jobs in the culture, media and sports sector than there are jobs likely to be available.

And even though almost a quarter of jobs are in the distribution, hotels and restaurant category, only about one in 40 youngsters are considering careers in these industries.

Fewer than one in 30 young people are considering jobs in banking and finance, even though one in five jobs are expected to be in this sector.

This "misalignment" could mean long-term problems for young people, the report says, because they are making decisions about qualifications and subjects with little awareness of the jobs market ahead of them.

And the report warns it can be difficult in later years to catch up with missing qualifications.

This lack of informed choices fuels the problem of employers struggling to find suitably skilled staff, even though there are high levels of youth unemployment.

The report also looks at the perceptions of young people about types of employment.

Among the 10 least preferred occupations are jobs such as surveyor and speech therapist, even though they are likely to earn above-average pay.

The two least preferred jobs, as identified by teenagers, are factory work and glazers.

The most preferred employment areas, from the perspective of teenagers, include teaching, the law, the police, psychology and sport.

These might be influenced either by role models such as teachers at school - or else by media images.

But the report says it suggests the narrowness of young people's view of the types of work available - and the failure of employers to present a broader picture of opportunities.

This is the latest warning about the need to improve careers education.

MPs on the education select committee earlier this year warned that careers services in England showed a "worrying deterioration" and called for urgent action.

It warned that the National Careers Service, launched last year, offered guidance by website and phone, but did not provide young people with face-to-face advisers.

Association of School and College Leaders general secretary Brian Lightman said the report showed the importance of "ensuring that all young people are properly informed about the range of career routes open to them".

"It also underlines the need for a nationally co-ordinated careers service which ensures that young people anywhere in the country are able to access face to face guidance by a qualified careers professional," said Mr Lightman.

Deloitte chairman David Cruickshank said there was a recognition of the need to forge relationships between schools and employers. "Both sides are willing, but for too many, partnership has felt too difficult," he said.

Education and Employers Taskforce director Nick Chambers said: "As a country we are doing our young people a huge disservice if we don't give them enough information to allow then to make proper informed decisions about their futures."

This charity has campaigned to improve the quality of careers education, highlighting the link between social mobility and access to career advice and work experience.

It runs projects such as Inspiring the Future and Speakers for Schools that encourage people from different professions to visit state schools and talk about their jobs.

Among the most prominent Speakers for Schools was software billionaire Bill Gates, who visited a secondary school in south London.

This confirms my belief that the way the careers advice industry thinks people should think about work is weird. I'm not sure the majority of hotel and restraunt jobs are actually the sort of jobs well adjusted teenagers should be very enthusiastic about getting. Is it so awful that teenagers dream their dreams and settle for that sort of work later if they can't get what they were after?

Some jobs are more desirable than others, why would it be more correct for the proportion of teenagers madly enthusiastic about being bog cleaners to match the number of bog cleaning vacancies?

I don't think it's wrong for people to have an idea of a dream job, but the problem is, when a significant proportion of young people are chasing careers in such over-subscribed industries - particularly as Jack93o says, in Arts and Humanities disciplines, it adds to the shortages of talent in STEM careers. Once you make that decision to go down that path, it's very difficult to convert back across as you've developed a largely incompatible skill set. Where STEM graduates might not be able to get into the exact role they want, they can typically still find an adjacent career that still leverages their skills and knowledge.

My worry is that students go following a dream that they're unlikely to ever achieve, end up on the graduate scrapheap. That said, there's always a requirement for low paid work in the service industry. I just don't think it's a good use of public money endlessly subsidising people to do degrees that aren't going to provide much RoI for the wider economy.

Playing Devil's Advocate here for a moment... is the answer reducing the number of places at uni for courses where direct employability in that discipline is low? Maybe. But does this run the risk of elitism? On the other hand, likely candidates for employment post-graduation in these extremely competitive disciplines are going to be those with the best grades anyway, so by doing this are we really disadvantaging people from weaker academic backgrounds?

Improving careers advice and making young people aware of the difficulties that they'll face in getting a job after graduating is definitely important. I think universities need to be more frank and open about students employability after taking their courses and applicants need to be aware of these statistics much much earlier on. What worries me though is that you could say to a group of young people that all want to do some over-saturated career, only 10% of you will ever get a job, you'd still get a pretty large proportion of that group believing that they can be in that 10%. Admirable? Yes. Realistic? No. Careers advice needs to beat home the reality of the choices that young people are going to make and greater emphasis needs to be made on employability prospects when making these decisions, in my opinion.

A lot of it is due to students being told to simply pursue what they enjoy. Take university courses for example, the no.1 most common advice I've heard/seen given out to students, is to pick what they enjoy most. I think a lot of students end up taking this advice too literally, leading them with the belief that they shouldn't settle for anything else other than what they enjoy most.

One particular line from that article sums it up best for me, ''large numbers will be aiming for jobs that are in short supply'' - it reminds you of the problem in courses like: law, english lit, history, philosophy, basically the arts and humanities (and social sciences as well). There are so many people who pursue these courses having only factored in their personal interests without much thought about the jobs market, and who can blame them? They've been told to take this idealistic approach by virtually everyone.