A new study from the OECD shows a significant mismatch between teenagers’ career expectations and where the jobs are in their countries’ economies.

Even more worryingly – there is an added mismatch in many OECD countries for students from low socio-economic backgrounds whose high school performance is well below what is required for entry into the professions they aspire to work in.

The report summarises the issues across various OECD countries (including Australia) as:

  1. “Rapidly growing numbers of students are uncertain about their career plans, linking with poorer ultimate employment outcomes.
  2. Students’ job plans focus on a small number of predominantly professional occupations which compare poorly to actual patterns of employer demand.
  3. Many students, especially from more disadvantaged backgrounds, are confused about what they need to do to achieve their career plans.
  4. Overwhelmingly, social background is a stronger determinant of plans for tertiary education than academic ability as tested on the PISA assessments.
  5. Too few students are participating in career development activities which are most strongly linked with better ultimate outcomes in employment.
  6. Across the OECD, students from more advantaged social backgrounds can expect to engage more in guidance than their disadvantaged classmates who will typically have greater need for support.
  7. The interest of girls and boys in occupational fields of strategic importance where their gender is historically underrepresented has changed little over the last generation.
  8. Many students feel poorly prepared for their futures and doubt that their schools are helping them in their career preparation.”

Although Australian students are among the least ‘career uncertain’ in the OECD (6th of the 37 countries reporting data), almost one in three (29%) of Australian teenagers do not know what future career they aspire to (ie are ‘career uncertain’) making their tertiary study choices more difficult.

However, while career certainty can be a positive – that is not the case when it means many teenagers aspire to work in a narrow number of unattainable job roles.

Across the OECD the top 5 occupations that 31.2% of boys aspired to were:

  1. ICT professionals (8.7%)
  2. Sportspeople (7.4%)
  3. Engineers (6.6%)
  4. Doctors (5.2%)
  5. Teachers (3.3%)

And the Top 5 occupations that 37.1% of girls were expecting to work in were:

  1. Doctors (12.2%)
  2. Teachers (7.3%)
  3. Lawyers (6.5%)
  4. Nursing and midwives (5.8%)
  5. Psychologists (5.3%)

In Australia, two-thirds of teenagers aspire to a professional career (the 12th highest level in the OECD). A small number of job roles at the ‘professional level’ (ISCO Major group 2 which is broadly comparable to the ‘professional’ occupation group in the Occupation Standard Classification for Australia) can be achieved with VET qualifications, eg nursing professionals and multimedia designers, but the majority require higher education (eg lawyers, doctors, dentists, teachers, architects, chemical engineers, meteorologists, psychologists, and accountants).

Clearly 65% of job roles in the Australian labour market are not professional occupations, even with the growing prevalence of jobs requiring tertiary study. In fact the latest Jobs and Skills Australia data shows only 27% of job roles in the labour market are at the professional level.

The OECD report goes on to identify data from seven large scale, longitudinal, datasets showing the importance of employer engagement in teenage career development activities. These studies find that “career insight talks and job fairs, workplace visits and job shadowing, career conversations, career pathway programmes, application and interview skills development activities, part-time working, volunteer work and internships…” and show “… positive impacts can be identified linked to the later likelihood of being in employment, education or training, earnings and/or job satisfaction. Such career activities are also associated with more beneficial forms of teenage career thinking (clear, ambitious, aligned plans that recognise the value of education in employment transition).”

As Australia thinks about how it can use this research to strengthen teenage career development activities, one other area of concern to be addressed is the fact that low SES students in Australia have higher rates of career misalignment than those in 11 other OECD countries – that is approximately 1 in 4 (25%) of low SES students are dreaming about careers that they do not have the academic grades to gain entry to.