An Argumentative Teenager Is NOT Destined to be a Lawyer

And other myths about occupational destiny

I hear these types of statements all the time from parents of students I serve. I think a combination of a desire to predict destiny for our kids, a longing to understand our teens and the hope that our kids won’t live in our basements causes us to say these sort of things.

But these good intentions don’t justify the possible harm that can come from trying to prematurely determine our kids’ paths with limited observations of our kids and wrong information about what is actually involved in different occupations.

Even better than occupational tests are occupational observations. Students need to gain context in order to really understand what different jobs are really like (working conditions, the kinds of people you’ll have as coworkers, required skills, daily tasks, how specialized/generic the work is, etc). Without this context, it’s easy to make assumptions about careers, like “lawyers spend all day arguing” or “engineerings spend all day building” or “marine biologists play with the dolphins.”

So, next time you are tempted to predict your child’s occupational future, give them a chance to objectively see their talents and hidden interests and gain some real-world context. Don’t let CSI, Criminal Minds or Grey’s Anatomy be the main source of information. You and your kid will be disappointed in the end. Plus, there are more (and way cooler) jobs out there that never make it on screen and that you didn’t even know existed.

Related posts:

This exchange happened when I was 13 years old, in my science class. Up until this point I could comfortably identify my nationality as British, my ethnicity as Indian, my culture as Punjabi and the…

This post is part of the D as Diagramming project which aims to explore the power of diagrams and diagramming. What I really want to know is about the value of diagrams for turning tacit knowledge…

The New York Times is one of the most renowned and trusted newspapers worldwide. It is an excellent resource to stay informed on the latest in politics, skim movie reviews, or try your luck doing…