Over the years at NUSTEM we’ve asked a lot of children what they want to do when they grow up.

We have found that although children’s aspirations are generally high, the jobs that they aspire to come from a small pool of possibilities.  In fact, in one of our projects where we asked this question to over 600 children aged between 7 and 11 there were only 82 different jobs named.  And just 20 jobs accounted for 75% of all of the aspirations.

In general, for young children, their career aspirations are linked to their hobbies and interests (e.g. author, footballer, artist) or jobs they see around them (e.g. teacher, police officer, vet).

But is that a problem?

To be honest, I don’t think it is – at least not in primary school.

Think about your career aspirations when you were 10.  Are you doing that job now?  If you think back you can probably recall your understanding of careers changing over time. As we get older, we come to understand more about jobs and how to get them.

There are a number of researchers who have looked at the process of career development for children and adults.

Looking at the theories together we can see that over time, children’s understanding of careers changes as they themselves develop and grow.

At NUSTEM we thought it would be useful to create an infographic which bring together the information from different research papers for teachers.

The infographic describes how children’s knowledge and aspirations for careers changes between the ages of 3 and 14+, and also includes some suggestions for the types of career-related learning that might take place in the classroom at those different ages.