Q: LinkedIn recently surveyed 8,000 adults about their childhood dream jobs and the careers they ended up in. First off, what are the jobs kids most often dream about?
A: We broke it up by gender, so the top jobs for boys are professional or Olympic athletes. You’ve also got your classic airplane or helicopter pilot, and then scientist and lawyer. And for girls we’ve got teacher, veterinarian, writer, doctor and singer.
Q: What makes these jobs exciting to kids?
A: One, it’s a matter of what we see as kids. With the Olympic athletes, there’s a sense of awe, like something’s so big and magnificent and visible. It piques our interest. What’s interesting about dream jobs is they’re pre- the presumption that you can’t do this or it doesn’t pay enough or my mom doesn’t think this is a good job for me. Your childhood dream is instinctively the truest sense of what you’re really inclined towards.
Q: How does gender work into it?
A: With women, you see teacher and for men, you see pilot – there’s a gender association. I think in the next 10 years we’re going to see different dream jobs. At this point, still, we’re surveying people generationally who would’ve seen the majority of teachers being women. And vice versa, you see men primarily as pilots and boys would think, “This looks like a career I can do.”
Q: What jobs never enter the dreams of children?
A: Generally speaking, it’s the jobs that are unseen. Jobs that have exposure help a kid think, “Oh, that might be possible for me.”
Q: Why do people wind up settling for something other than their dream jobs?
A: The most common response was they were just led down another path. It lost its relevance to them. Only one out of every three surveyed said they did have their childhood dream job or worked in a related career, so that’s a lot of people who feel they don’t work in their dream job.
Q: Did anyone have not having a job as his childhood dream job?
A: There were only a handful of people who indicated that they either didn’t want to have to work or didn’t have a dream job as a child — with most of that handful landing in the latter category. Of the few that indicated that they didn’t want to work, they mentioned things like “I didn’t want to do what my parents did” or “I didn’t want to work in an office.”
Q: If there’s a difference between an adult’s actual job and her childhood dream job, how can she reconcile the disparity?
A: There’s a couple of things you can do. I have a friend who wanted to be a doctor, but in the end it wasn’t possible financially, so what she does is volunteer at the hospital. The point is often times your dream career is attached to an inherent passion for something, and you can experience that in your life in ways that don’t necessarily have to match your employment and will enhance your paid employment because you’ll have this opportunity to fulfill this deep-seated dream in another capacity. I don’t think you have to be paid for it necessarily in order to experience a little bit of it. The other thing I recommend is looking at someone who’s doing your dream job. What kinds of skill sets do they have? Are there elements of that you can bring to your own job?
Q: Should parents foster more realistic dreams in terms of careers for their children?
A: I say no. The whole point of dreaming is coming at something from the perspective of abundance. The world will beat down that sense of hope and abundance and possibility and opportunity. But, if your kid is moving in a realm that’s absolutely unrealistic for them, perhaps steer them in a direction that’s more feasible. But if I would’ve told my mom I wanted to be an author, she would’ve said, “You’re crazy. There’s no way. We don’t know anyone in publishing. That’s unrealistic.” That probably would’ve dissuaded me from actually going out there and being an author.