Closing the Gap Between Young People’s Job Aspirations and Labour Market Realities

Young people are currently being failed by a lack of good information about the huge array of careers opportunities available to them. This is one of the sobering implications from the OECD’s recent report, ‘The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation’, which used data from their Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) to compare the state of career preparation among teenagers across more than 80 countries between 2000 and 2022.

Amongst their findings were the following:

• The job expectations of students have changed little since the start of the century and now bear little relation to actual patterns of labour market demand.
• Most jobs young people want remain out of reach: their career choices are narrowing and increasingly focused on a limited number of traditional, high-status jobs.

Aspirations Remain Static While the World of Work is Changing

To put some numbers to the challenge, the OECD found that 50% of girls and 44% of boys aspire to do the same ten occupations. Furthermore, most of the occupations in these top 10s in 2024 were the same as the top 10s back in 2000. In other words, the aspirations of most teenagers haven’t shifted significantly in nearly a quarter of a century. 

Yet the labour market has changed significantly over that period. Lightcast’s Job Postings Analytics for the UK shows that the top 10 occupations identified by 50% of girls account for just over 11% of all jobs in today’s labour market. For boys, the mismatch is slightly narrower, with the top 10 occupations identified by 44% of boys accounting for just over 15% of all jobs. Our data shows that the picture is similar on a global level.

The Speed of Skills Change

The career hopes and aspirations of young people appear to be out of step with reality. But before we come on to consider potential solutions, we need to first mention another factor. This is the speed of skill change. 

One of the striking things about the mismatch of aspirations to occupations is that it isn’t just about the types of jobs available. It’s about how those jobs are changing under our feet. Our recent research on the US and UK labour markets – The Speed of Skill Change and The UK Skills Revolution – came up with a very similar statistic regarding the change in skill composition of jobs. In the US, 32% of the top skills required for the average job had changed from 2021-2024; in the UK, the figure was 33%. So even when a job title stays the same, on average a third of the top skills required to do the role have changed in just the last three years.

This phenomenon is becoming even more acute when we consider the impact of artificial intelligence. While newspaper headlines warn about AI taking jobs, the reality is more nuanced. In most cases, AI is augmenting roles rather than replacing them, as we demonstrated in The Lightcast Global AI Skills Outlook. Yet that augmentation still demands a shift in the skills required to perform a job, which itself demands a shift in the skills young people are learning as part of their career preparation.

The Answer is Not More Information but Better Information

In his Foreword to the OECD report, Nick Chambers, CEO of Education and Employers, drew attention to the fact that the sheer amount of choice in careers can be overwhelming to young people, such that many simply end up sticking to what they know from their immediate environment. In a follow up piece in FE News, he commented on this further:

“Young people’s knowledge of jobs and the opportunities open to them is largely driven by people they know, as well as TV and social media.  In many cases it leads them to aspire to a very narrow number of traditional roles that are not in sync with the growth-generating roles that the UK needs.”

More information, per se, is not necessarily the answer, since it could simply become yet more overload to young people who are already swamped with careers advice. But better information surely is the answer. Information that gives teenagers clarity on the labour market awaiting them, such as:

• A view of the full range of occupations available to them in their area, including employer demand for these roles, projected growth over the next few years, and the salaries they pay.
• A view of the skills that employers are requesting for these occupations, including both specialised skills and the common or transferrable skills.
• A view of other similar careers that might be of interest, based on requiring a similar set of skills to the initial job aspiration.

To see this kind of labour market data-driven approach to careers information in action, check out the UCAS Careers Quiz, which uses this sort of data to guide young people from the type of activities they would like to do, through to a set of possible careers based on their answers, and onto the kinds of insights within those careers mentioned above.

Preparing the Future-Ready Workforce

The real challenge, and the real opportunity, is to equip young people with the insight, flexibility, and resilience to thrive in a labour market that is currently defined by change. This means taking their aspirations and evaluating them against the real-world of work using real-world data. Sometimes the data will help them to understand that there are many more career options available to them. Sometimes it will help them change their focus if they see there is little demand for the job they are thinking about. Sometimes it will enable them to realise how doing a certain course can open up alternatives to their ambition, because of the transferrable skills it will give them. 

The nature of the fast-changing labour market means that the future is likely to see more changes to occupations, and more changes to the skills needed to do those occupations. If we want to see the career aspirations of young people match the workforce realities caused by these shifts, we’re going to need to give them the kind of data-driven insights that can truly help them both broaden their horizons on the opportunities available, and at the same time ground these opportunities in reality – so that the decisions they make prepare them to take their place in tomorrow’s workforce.

By Elena Magrini, Head of Global Research at Lightcast