- Writer. - Singer.

Teacher.

I asked this question to colleagues, but for more than 20 years, that question has also been asked to millions of teenagers worldwide.

What job do you expect to be doing at 30?

Lawyer.

Journalist.

Managing a production company.

This question is important because over time, it can tell us how a generation of young people thinks about the future.

So how do actually 15-year-olds answer?

Let's find out.

This visualization shows all the jobs 15 year olds listed in the year 2000.

The top job was medical doctor, but there's also athlete, decorator, military officer.

Way lower on the list, there are jobs like pharmacist and real estate agent.

There are so many jobs listed that researchers tried to simplify it by clustering the jobs into even broader categories.

Here's the top ten list for girls.

Nearly half of all kids expected to do the same ten jobs.

That was more than 20 years ago.

So these kids are now in their mid-30s.

Did their expectations come true?

Not really.

For example, about 11% of girls and about 5% of boys expected to be doctors.

But these days, less than 0.5% of working age people in the countries where they did this survey are actually doctors.

In 2018, this question was asked again to 15-year-olds, and this time to a much bigger group.

Again, the top answers were doctor,

lawyer,

athlete.

And there were a bunch of other interesting jobs, too.

When researchers simplified this list, half of all kids expected to do the same ten jobs again.

But from 2000 to 2018, one thing did change.

In 2000, a portion of kids didn't actually name a job. About 14%.

In 2018, that group jumped to 25%.

Here's why that's a problem.

There's a great piece of research that tracked thousands of 8th graders starting in 1988.

They specifically focused on kids who had science related ambitions but were just average in math.

They compared that group to kids who had no science-related ambitions, but they were high achieving in math.

Turns out the kids with science-related ambitions were far more likely to get a science or engineering degree, even though they weren't as good at math.

What this study showed was that ambition, even at an early age, plays a huge part in people's professional outcomes.

Part of why it's so important is that it helps them plan for the future.

For example, if they expect to have a job that requires a college degree, then they should make plans to go to college.

For that reason, the PISA survey also asks if kids expect to attend college.

And it found something interesting.

Among the kids who expect to have a job that requires a college degree, 1 in 5 had no plans to attend college,

which means they probably won't be doing the job they expect to do.

When teens expect to have a certain job, but they don't plan on getting the required education or experience,

researchers who study career paths call that misalignment.

One study of Australian teenagers found that kids who are misaligned at 15 were twice as likely to be unemployed or not in school at age 25.

Another study tracked American 15-year-olds.

They found that the students who were aligned or over-aligned, which means they plan to get more than enough education for their expected job,

these kids had higher wages throughout their career compared to misaligned kids.

But researchers who study these career pathways have a pretty good idea of things we can do to help students think more clearly about their future.

For one, young people need to explore various careers, maybe by visiting workplaces.

And it's useful if they've experienced a workplace by working part-time or volunteering.

Those experiences should help them think about what job they expect to do and make plans accordingly.

But most students don't get these opportunities.

Only about 40% of students in this survey said they participated in job shadowing or worksite visits.

And a similar percentage of kids said they participated in job fairs.

In other words, 15-year-olds aren't getting the support they need to answer this question.

When we don't do the work of helping kids think through their futures, it's disadvantaged kids who suffer the most.

Among the most affluent kids, only about 1 in 10 are misaligned.

But among the poorest kids, about 1 in 3 are misaligned.

So we entrench the inequality that already exists.

This is every kid who answered the survey in 2018.

The researchers also looked at which of these jobs are at risk of automation.

It turns out about 40% of 15-year-olds expect to do a job at risk of automation in their country.

When you were 15, what did you expect you would grow up to be?

It gets at this profound question of who you expect to be and what you expect the world to look like.

Maybe it's not fair to ask 15-year-olds this question,

but fair or not, these surveys tell us they need more help coming up with their answers.