Career and Life Pathways for Young People in Turbulent Times - A Conversation with Global Experts

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If we think about jobs so specifically, we might box ourselves in a little bit. We might lose a little bit of the magic. It's learning how to understand ourselves, what makes us tick, what kind of learners we are, and finding something that you truly, truly love, that you wake up in the morning and want to do. I mean, I think we're all in these chairs and on these screens right now because a part of what we do still really excites us.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Grid Impact Labs.

One of our main roles as educators is to support and help our young people figure out who they are and how they want to contribute to the world. Given our current context of rapid technological change, questions about future options for young people is becoming increasingly challenging, and for educators and guidance counselors too, to be able to navigate this rapidly changing terrain. Back in May 2023, I had a conversation on the podcast with some young people who were expressing exactly these concerns about decisions and choices they were making in their lives about what courses to choose and what careers to pursue. And since then, I've been really wanting to bring together a group of experts around this question of how do we guide our young people into life and career pathways in our current context. So it's a huge pleasure this week to be able to bring together Rosa Moreno Zatartas, Anisa Shaikh, Kathleen Delasky, and Anthony Mann for a conversation on this topic.

I'll let them introduce themselves in a moment, but also do stick around to the end because after the conversation, I also had a brief reflection with Shira Wolf-Cohen, who is another expert and author of Leading Future-Focused Schools: Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success.

So I really hope you enjoy the conversation, and any reports and references that we talk about in the conversation are also linked in the show notes.

Lovely. Well, let's dive in. Thank you so much for joining. This has been an extremely important question to me that I've been thinking a lot about. I'm very much not a specialist in this area, but given the, the amount of changes in general happening in the world, all in all sorts of sectors with advanced AI, with all of the conversations we have on the podcast about the changes in education and, you you know, some of them desired, some of them disrupted. And then also just from a personal perspective, having 3 of my own children who are all adolescents and wondering, how do I even guide them as their parent? It's a challenging context for really supporting young people right now to know what decisions they might be making, where, where their pathways might take them through education and into careers. So yeah, perhaps we can just start with, if you wouldn't mind just doing a brief introduction, but I'd like to start the conversation just really centering the young people themselves and their own feelings and emotions about how they might be feeling about their future. So, so just thinking about any young people in your lives that you interact with, that may be relations or it may be young people that you professionally interact with and guide yourselves. Yeah, perhaps you could just share how in your experience do you think young people are feeling about their futures right now? Kathleen, perhaps if we can start with you.

Well, thank you. So I'm Kathleen Delaski. I'm based in the US and I Founded a nonprofit, you know, 10 or 12 years ago called the Education Design Lab that largely works with colleges, but also with, you know, states and organizations to kind of rethink the design of higher education and to rethink like the end of high school into college. And so that's the context under which I wrote a book recently called "Who Needs College Anymore?" It's a worrisome time for, I think, young people and their parents or their, you know, guardians Largely because we're sort of in the eye of the cyclone right now with these technology changes. And in the US, at least where I live, there's also a downturn in the economy, particularly for knowledge workers. And then I, of course, live in the Washington, DC area where everyone's been doged, not everyone, but a number of people have lost their jobs. So it's a tense time. And I'm often asked in my professional capacity, well, what should we tell young people? What should they be preparing for? And I think what I say to friends, family, and young folks is, you know, carry on. This too will pass in the sense that the fundamentals are still the same, right? Which is, you know, really think about how to express your curiosity, how to turn your interests and your initiatives into careers or futures that could, you know, earn you a living. And looking for those intersections will still be, you know, how the game is played, if you will. The difference might be that you need to lean into the technology that young people are taking to anyway in their daily lives. And think about though, how do you utilize those technologies to get things done, not just to acquire information or download knowledge, but, you know, think about how you would make things happen in the world and stay very curious. So, you know, we have a lot of very specific things in the US around how difficult it's becoming for folks to go to college and get a college degree, which we could talk about later. But I think, you know, generally the environment is, you know, one of tension about do the things, you know, do the things I've always done, will they work in the future? Because technology is, you know, perhaps taking jobs away and changing things so quickly. So, you know, that's the environment that we're in. But I, you know, I tell students, young people, you know, carry on, stay calm and carry on, right?

Thank you so much. Rosa, should we come, come across to you?

Yes, thank you. So Kathleen, very enlightening. I'm very glad you, you started it off. My name is Rosa Moreno-Sotares and And I am here as the Global Director of Program Strategy and Partnerships at the IC3 Institute, which is a non-for-profit organization with the mission to ensure that there's career counseling in every school. My background has been a teacher in a classroom, counselor in leadership roles, policy reviews of education, and now in, in the capacity of researcher. So you're gonna hear me quote a lot about the research that we've been carrying on in the last 5 years in the institute, which is our Student Quest Report. So in response On to the question, Tim, I would add to what Kathleen has said is that we're finding students globally feeling very uncertain and embracing change and shifts as their common day adventure. We're finding that the questioning is happening in terms of why are we doing what we're doing? What should we be studying? What is the value of what I am doing? Where should I pursue my education? How do I get there? What am I going to do afterwards? And these are traditional questions that we've seen happening all across the globe. What we're seeing new is the questioning of, are my support systems evolving with me? And it's frightening for teachers to perceive that they might not have the skills to support students. They might not be AI literate, for example. And there is an emerging role in the function of the teacher and the counselor and every educator to be more than providing instruction for an academic. There's more request for support, for counseling, for a trusted source for what to do in life, even for future readiness, even the math teacher, a librarian. So there is a shift in where I am going to get my trusted sources from students. In addition to that, we're seeing that the career conversation is starting much earlier. It is starting in the year 12 and 13 across the globe. And it's surprising because it is very much 45%, 47% in the last 2 years that students are reporting that that is when they're mapping out their important questions for teachers and not necessarily in 14+. 14+, the questions are more in terms of how do I make this application happen? Where does it go? It's very much more pragmatic. So if you allow me also, one of the things that we're noticing is in these students, how they define themselves as students with a new generation of values. They're finding that it is more important to ensure that there's mental health support in the institution more than the ranking, the traditional ranking. Don't get me wrong, positioning of value of the institution in the world still is an important factor, but we're seeing, and even in these ages, 13 and 14 years hold the conversation of, is there support for me? Will I be able to integrate pragmatically my skills? So this is just like the first opener. I, I will be referring to a lot more data points, but this is what we're seeing students feeling, experiencing in the world today.

Amazing. Thanks, Rosa. That's super interesting about the evolution of the systems themselves and the uncertainty not just being with the young people but also being with the systems and the people holding or working in those systems. Yeah. Fascinating. Thank you. Anthony, come across to you.

It's great to be here. So for the last 8 years, I worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD. And for the last 5 of those, I led our career readiness project. And in that role, we looked at big, big data. We looked at data from longitudinal datasets, big cohorts of students. You follow them from age, maybe even birth, but often from 15 through to 25. And you can use these to see, can been getting really strong evidence to see if career development works. And we produced lots of new data to show that we have really hard evidence of lower unemployment, higher wages, greater job satisfaction, like particular types of career development. But also at the OECD, we run the PISA study. So people might be aware, this is where you look at your, you know, every 3 years the kids do tests in maths and reading and science, and they get all these league tables. But within those, we've been increasingly asking questions about career development. And these are great resources. So Tim, you're asking, you know, what some of the kids in my life are saying about, you know, how they're feeling. Well, these are the results from 800,000 students in 80 different countries, and some really, you know, huge amounts of really interesting information about them. These students are 15 when they do the test, 15 to 16, really important age. And so the last assessment which PISA did, 2022, the data takes a couple of years to come through, so I've only really been able to use it since the beginning of this year. You know, the students were asked for the first time about their attitudes and what they really felt about how well. They thought their schools are preparing them, you know, for life. And those results give us a lot to be worried about. I could tell you this is on average— this is across the OECD countries, the richer countries of the world, 38 countries. We find that half of them agree that school has done little to prepare me for adult life. We find that— and this is the figure which, you know, I find really chilling— 24% of them think the school has been a waste of time. And we asked the same question in 2012 And in 2012, 11% of them said it was a waste of time. They agreed with that. It's increased to 24. For boys, it's gone from 16% to 29%. So we see a lot of some of that concern, which Kathleen was talking about, some of those tensions. But also, Rosie, you were talking about uncertainty. Well, we ask them every time we do PISA, tell us what kind of job do you think you'll have around the age of 30? And going back to 2000, 20 years ago, maybe about 90% of them, they could name an occupational expectation. It might change, but they had something in their minds. In 2022, it had risen to 39%. So nearly 2 out of 5 haven't really got an idea about the sort of job they expect to do. And half of them, 46% of them, say that they don't feel their school has helped give them confidence to make decisions. So we're picking up a lot of evidence that students are concerned. And also, from all this data, we're picking up a lot about how career guidance and career development work brilliantly for kids, make a big difference for them in their lives. But we're finding that not enough young people around the world are getting the support that they need.

Amazing. Thank you. Yeah.

Fascinating. That is chilling. And hopefully one of the reasons why we do this podcast is like what school perhaps could transform into or become if we start thinking a little bit differently about it. But no, amazing. Thank you. Anissa.

Hi, I'm Anissa and I have a bad throat, so this is gonna be interesting. I have been professionally kind of in a fairly diverse landscape for me, but I've worked in the media and most recently in education and in tech operationally, program management-wise, directly with students, adults who are career changers and looking for jobs, but predominantly in the last years in sort of the arm that supports careers. So transition between learning something new or learning some skill set in the tech industry. So let's say data analysis, AI, project management, things of the sort, and then actually landing a job in the market. And I'm, I mean, I've done other things, but I think this is probably more relevant. And I worked with Tim Logan at a school for many years, frankly, probably one of my one of my favorite jobs ever, where I work with the 5th and 6th grade, which, as you know, is the transition period between primary and secondary school, and I think one of the most challenging times, frankly, for children. Exactly, I'm getting nods from Rosa. Yeah, and I did actually have a lot of conversations about this even early on at that point. So that's just by way of my introduction. I think so many incredible points have already been addressed. I think what we're probably not doing clearly enough is what I like to call reverse engineering a little bit, which is having students actually understand what roles there could be. It sounds like a super adult thing, right? What is a program manager? What is customer success? What is a data analysis engineer? What is an LLM engineer? I'm 40. I only just figured these things out in the last years. So how could we expect 15-year-olds and 12-year-olds to understand what these careers are? And then what they would require to, to know from a skillset perspective, how to get there. I mean, when I was young, we would go through, went through the British system. So you'd pick you'd pick your subjects and then you'd imagine what the future would look like and you'd make sure you did the sciences if you wanted to be a doctor and you did your math if you wanted to be an engineer. And then it ballooned from there. And my slightly maybe radical perspective is that doesn't work any longer. There is a lot of diversification in the industry, especially in tech careers, and it would be very useful for children to understand what would I require in order to do this thing that sounds cool and interesting to me at this stage in my life. There's very little literacy when it comes to, you know, tech programming, understanding, creating, using tech in any way or form. In schools at the moment. And there's the same gap that we see where the 6th grade moves to the 7th grade. We see this gap between students graduating from school to college and then from college to finding jobs. And then actually for adults who want to change careers, there is a huge challenge there as well. And I think the industry responds the same way. So that's one point I'd like to make. And then just adding a little bit to, I think, what Kathleen was saying earlier and even the support systems growing with, with, with young people. I'm not convinced that parents, let's say people even of my generation or older, are also at the same level. I mean, if children are surrounded by their educators and by their parents, and if the educators, let's say, aren't at that level or haven't been given the funds or the resources to be trained that way, then unfortunately, but frankly, it's the fact, then parents have to be. They have to know how to talk about careers with children. And I'm not sure that this age group or this, this subset understands fully how to do that either.

Either.

And I think that could be an area to create more resources, more material, more support also.

Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, that's absolutely— and I'd love to— maybe we can come back to the point on parents because I do think that's critical. It's definitely what I'm trying to also bring in just in my own personal experience with my own children and perhaps you all yourselves.

But I, you know, I speak to many parents who feel the same.

Friends or through professional networks. And it is with things shifting and changing so quickly, it's a very real challenge, right? And Rosa speaks to, you know, the evolution of the support systems as well. So we'll hopefully come on to that. But perhaps just picking up, Anisa, on one of your points there, just, it's definitely something I just wanted to open up in terms of given how quickly things are changing, how might we help perhaps with things you've seen, good practice that you've seen across through the research, or just to help help people understand what kinds of things are available. Because I think too often there's a conversation that's a very kind of 20th century conversation about, you know, do you want to be a doctor, an engineer, or a, you know, list 4 or 5 more standard careers that are generally brought as the kind of the main options. And then very little else is, and the reality of people's career journey often is very much more organic, very much I decide at the beginning and then just execute the steps to get the right credentials to get there. It's much more of a, of a kind of an evolving journey. But also the sectors are evolving, Green Pathways, the technology, different skilled trades, et cetera. So yeah, I guess the question there is how might we open up the literacy around the kinds of careers that are available firstly, before we then perhaps get into more of the support for the young people. But if even the counselors aren't aware of the shifting landscape, you know, it's a challenge.

I mean, I think it would obviously have to be multifold in that sense, but I'll start with an example that came to mind while you were speaking. So imagine we're in a classroom and there's lots of group activities going on and we have 5 children that are sitting there and I don't— they're doing something, right? And, and one of them has been various pedagogical approaches might emerge the leader, let's just say, and is organizing everybody in a certain way and everybody has their role. When we ask children, what do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be a doctor? Do you want to be a lawyer? Do you want to be a ballerina? Do you want to be an astronaut? At the end of that activity in a classroom, do we say, would you like to be a project manager? You think you'd have great, great skills to manage people? Maybe not that terminology, but if we manage to start to integrate more relevant terminology, maybe not the very, you know, dry, boring stuff into classrooms already where those kind of careers also seem exciting or that students understand what they are, well, why not? And a way to do that is to perhaps be be looking out for very early indicators of soft skills because we have them even when we're children. I mean, why do we suddenly develop them when we're on LinkedIn? It doesn't happen just then. So I mean, that could be, you know, one way to do this in classrooms. And, you know, perhaps in another sense, how do we get people to know more? I didn't know anything about any of this. I mean, I was working in a school with you, and I had some tech background, but I'm not a programmer. I work in tech. I've been working in tech for 8 years. I've never programmed anything. Very few people understand how many potential jobs there are in the tech industry that have nothing to do with sitting on a computer staring at a black screen and typing in symbols because we don't know what it takes to get there. And I, I think in order to, to, okay, parents and teachers, educators, and then just general public, and then trickle-down effect, or even with children, you have to get them interested in things that are exciting, right? And also to talk about the hygiene of it. There's a lot of fear around AI. There's a lot of fear around— after, you know, certain Netflix shows have come out, there's a lot of fear around technology, or there's a push towards it, or there's a pull away from it. So again, I'm speaking from strictly the technology perspective, I think it would be really, really wonderful if there were more access to classes, workshops, and understanding of what is out there. What can you already do at this age? How can you learn to be literate? But how can you connect it to something exciting and inspiring? How can you create electronic music? How can you program something like a small something that you can work on and share with somebody? I think that is something that we could offer as institutions and schools, and not to exclude parent-child together sort of opportunities. I'm not sure if this directly addresses your question, I hope.

No, no, that's great. Yeah, no, no, let's explore.

Yeah, Kathleen, please.

Yeah, could I add that sort of the world that Anissa is describing has been, you know, cut off to many counselors because they don't know the job, what the jobs of the future, they don't have that expertise. And what's interesting to me is that, you know, I mean, I've been pondering this question for like 5 years with my team. How do we get these guidance tools into the hands of teachers and counselors at the, you know, school level, at the primary, secondary, and tertiary school level. And you know what? We, we've gotten a gift that's getting better every minute, which is ChatGPT, or pick your AI tool. You can now answer the question in detail. I just tried to do an example of it, which, right before this call, so that I could think about how, how good is it getting. It's getting pretty good, you know, where you can go in and figure out all the things you would need to share with kids just by looking up a job title and looking at what skills you need, what preparation, or even to ask, what are the emerging jobs in technology or in healthcare or in advanced manufacturing? We have the tools at our fingertips. I mean, everyone does to start to answer those questions that were kind of cut off to us as non-technical people or people in education who didn't really know what was going on in the rest of the And that's exciting. I mean, that's like, you know, it opens up horizons that we were sort of waiting for cool Google Maps kinds of products to come out, but it's like we don't have to wait anymore. And I'm finding that really empowering.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Raisa, do you?

Oh yes. Kathleen and Lisa, you're speaking my language. Definitely. Because we are looking at schools, right? We're looking at schools and we're looking at young people. And Anthony actually made me a little bit sad because it is true in the sense that there's a clear disconnect between what students expect and what the current systems are delivering. No wonder they're saying it's a waste of time. We're finding it that the perception of the students and the perception of the counselors not necessarily go hand in hand. And that is very much for the AI and the technology. When you look at schools, you can see in the planning that there is the intent of integration, but the impact is not necessarily happening. And that may be definitely because the traditional models of learning are isolated. They're office-based, they're non-contextualized, and I wanted to bring this, an example of a way that we're finding change happening at this very moment. We're fortunate enough to be working with the Tanzania Institute of Education at the level of curriculum developers. And what is very important here is that in the contextualization of subjects, there's the insertion of career readiness already. So it's integrating that the teacher can also talk about math, but also, I, I am also aware of how this math is taking us into cybersecurity, for example. So bringing that concept of how the purpose of math, why are you studying this math, can integrate into the field of study is a way of contextualizing change. So it's bringing first and foremost the people who are in front of students every day teachers, counselors, educators, librarians in the conversation, in the awareness that we're in this together. So we can shift the question to, what is it you want to be? Towards what problems in the world do you want to solve? How do you see yourself relating to the world? So that's a conversation that removes it from a job that may or may not exist in the future and focuses it more on, I am learning this and I'm having a kick out of learning this math, and I think that I can start looking at other ways. So there's an integration, there's a change in the language, and we're seeing it now in curriculum that's being developed with math that is being taught to pave a road. That's the homework. Chemistry that is being added to this because what else do you need? So the whole traditional way of learning, Anthony, and when we look at PISA, we're always seeing that, is also holding accountable everyone in the process. When we say we want curiosity, are our teachers curious? Are our schools curious? So I would say that bringing that brechen together is one way of ensuring that there's a learning for change, a learning for different ways of working, a learning for a world that is requiring adaptability at every point.

Thanks, Rosa, that's great. Anthony, did you want to?

Well, I think I'd go a step further than you, Rosa, in thinking about this integration and its relevance, because when we look at our longitudinal datasets, and I must have looked at about 20 from 10 different countries, and you try and isolate the things which young people do and teenagers do in terms of their career development and see if you can find a positive impact later on after you account for all the different factors, you know, gender and social background and academic achievement and so and these fall into 3 areas, you know, kind of how they think about their futures, which is like, you know, do you have an idea, you know, do they know what the education they need to do to do it and so on. But the other areas are about exploration and experience firsthand. And overwhelmingly, these all focus on engagement with people from the world of work and experiences within the world of work. And so we see things like career talks, outside speakers, job fairs, workplace visits, visits, internships. We see career conversations, which can be with multiple people, including people who do jobs, and so on. We see interview and job application practice exercises, and so on. We see volunteering, we see part-time working. And I think this is really important for a young person because we kind of know from, you know, not just from PISA, from other studies, that young people have a very narrow view about their ambitions for the future. Typically, if You have 30 kids in a class, 15 of them say, what are you going to do? They'll say, I'm going to work in one of 10 popular jobs. You know, it's really concentrated. In some countries you might say 30% of girls say they're going to be a doctor, 20% of boys say they're going to work in IT. And career development is, it's like a conversation, it's a dialogue between the student as they sit in a classroom and imagine future self. But it's very hard for them to imagine what possible futures there might be because they've got such a blinkered view of it. And so this aspect of employer engagement, I think, is absolutely essential to effective provision. And we see in PISA that by the age of 15 or 16, fewer than half the students have done an internship, which may be understandable, but only about a third on average— in some countries much fewer— have been to a job fair. About 40% have been to a workplace visit. Most of them haven't. And that's what we see happens in terms— when they engage with, with employers. Well, they might— it might be about skill development if you're doing an internship, you know, that can be very useful, but you're not going to learn huge amounts of additional skills in often 1 or 2 weeks. But what you do have the opportunity to do is develop relationships with people who are new, who work in areas and understand those areas. And the studies show that even something as brief as a career talk can have a really long-lasting impact. And what we find is that the more that they have, the better the impacts later on. So it's like throwing mud at a wall— the more that is thrown, the more that will stick. Young people need to be attentive. They're not always and sometimes you need to repeat things. But, you know, by having a rich diet of employer engagement— and kind of the problem is, well, how do we enable this? And some countries are really good at it, some countries are terrible at it. But, you know, we're in communities, you know. If your neighbor was a teacher and said, would you mind coming into my school to talk to your kids about the job you do, you'd say yes, you know. So it's how we harness that willingness of people to talk about the things they do. And there are programs I like the, um, Inspiring the Future programs in New Zealand and in the UK, which recruits the people first, and then you say to the schools, here are your people, bring them in, you know. And so I think when we look at something like green jobs, you see the way that employers around the world are tearing their hair out, so they're not going to be able to find the skills in the future. Young people say they're really interested in the environment, say they'd like to work there, but they don't understand how it can happen. And so we need to make these things thinkable for them. We need to give them a confident understanding what the roots are, and then enable those curriculum. And so rather than as they go through education and into the early workplace, being battered from one side to the other side, a bit like, you know, somebody in a, you know, in a set of rapids, you know, they can start plotting their steps. They have a great sense of agency and understanding, you know, what are the rules of the game, how things work, what's good experience to get, what good qualifications to get, what's important to get, you know, a B or an A in this subject, you know, why I shouldn't drop that subject. And I think that's what we need to equip our students with. I think the gap between the world of work and the world of education has grown far too big, and we need to start bringing it back together.

That's brilliant.

Thanks, Anthony. One of the things that I find really interesting about that is, is that it's almost part of the design principles of alternative education provision now as well. So it's a, it comes up a lot for me. That's one of the reasons I'm interested in this question is that it's not just a question about guiding young people. It's also a question about how, to your point, how separate the world of formal education has become from the world itself, right? It, it's been walled off these into these white boxes that we parade our young people and then expect them to kind of learn about the world. World. And it's a, it comes up all the time on the podcast in all sorts of different ways. And part of what people thinking about alternative provision in, or what kind of emerging institutions could be doing post-traditional school or college concept, is opening up the space and, and connecting the relationships, connecting worlds so that people are exploring in a much more fluid and organic way in between, you know, based around passions and interests and, but really having opportunities to do that. And not implying by that that it's easy to do. It's much easier to wall off and do the separate formal education thing because it requires relationships and that takes time. It requires community and communication, et cetera. But there's something interesting there about that it's not just a careers question and a guidance question. It's also an educational kind of design challenge. But Kathleen, did you want to?

Yeah, I mean, I, this is partly what my book is about and the, you know, the sort of the bifurcation that we've created at least in the US, and I think this is happening in other places where you have the sort of trade school and you have the university system and never the twain shall meet. And, you know, what's happening in the economy and in the real world, as you say, is that technology is blurring the lines between what we used to call blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs. And now you might be working in a factory or, you know, in a green energy, in a wind farm and need more math skills than you would to be a doctor. And yet we separate the kids, you know, who are good at math and who aren't good at math. You know, in the US system, we, you know, we had been separating them in age 13, 14 based on whether you're college material. And now I think, you know, high schools in the US or the secondary schools are recognizing that what we call it career and technical education, that everyone needs it. And I think that is helping to change the conversation about, okay, what am I good at? I might want to become a data technician, and that's sort of a trade job, but yet I could raise up the ranks and be in the corner office and, you know, be a businessman in that field as well. And so, you know, I interview in my book, I interview students who just sort of stumbled into these tech classes that are considered in the vocational world, and they are getting job offers from having these industry certifications. Generations coming out of high school and they're not going to college. I mean, it's, there's a lot of variables, but it's even parent, and parents are now like, oh, do I want my kid on the college track? Or, you know, there's this really cool drone program over here and wow, he's gonna get a job and he's gonna get to work doing logistics supply chain for Walmart while he's in school. You know, it's so parents are kind of waking up to this as well that, wow, you know, these two worlds are blending. And I think that's a good thing.

Yeah, fascinating.

Yeah, I'm— I think what you were saying also, Rosa, was about something to do about the— I think you said the why, and to try to sort of integrate that as early as possible, or even the how. I completely agree here. We, we have so many possibilities within the tech world, and I know we keep talking about that, or at least I'm trying to talk about that, but I feel like we're not quite creating the excitement and inspiration that I think children need in order to understand a career that sounds fairly complicated. And that that can only happen in either the homing or the schooling environment in a way where you connect the why of something. So let's say they're doing something on Khan Academy. This is super cool. They're enjoying it. They're having a good time with it. And then the conversation could very well turn into, well, I could create something like this. I think this is cool. Plus, plus, plus, this could be me. I could create it. And what tech has done has also disrupted the education industry, right? We know this. I mean, frankly, most people I work with did not have a bachelor degree in data analysis or engineering. They did a bootcamp or they went online and watched YouTube tutorials or went and took a Udemy course for €250. So I'm not saying that we shouldn't stick to the traditional model that any of us had when we got out of high school. We thought, okay, we're going to university. But frankly, prices have become prohibitive at this point in time in some countries in the world. In some countries, yes, they're still, you know, it's still possible. But we're talking about a lot of people in the United States, for example. I mean, it's— if you have to spend over $150,000 to do an engineering degree in a university in America, let's say, which already already filters out many, many, many parents in a high schooling system that might not be able to do it unless their child has financial aid. Then they could look to the internet for these boot camps, kind of places where I've worked. They're called boot camps, but essentially they— you pay a certain amount of money to be able to do a 3-month, 9-month, you know, etc., course with instructors. Do they have a kind of, you know, a very big hard stamp of a great university behind them? Not necessarily, but they often get you accreditations from different standardized examinations, and they try to help you find jobs, which is what we did. And once you find a job, the only thing the employer cares about at this point is can you do your job. They're not really interested if, let's say, if doing your job means making sure that A plus B equals C, they're not going to care if Harvard showed you how to do it or a bootcamp in Frankfurt showed you how to do it, because ultimately in tech, it's very equalizing. I'm not putting down top quality education, but what I am saying is there's been a democratization of it a little bit, which is really positive. And I think it opens up the possibility for students who perhaps cannot afford a certain pathway or cannot go down that line, and for counselors to be able to even put some of those virtual brochures in front of students and say, you know, don't lose heart here because there are other options that you could potentially skill up with, you know, in the meantime, and that could open a career path for you. I studied philosophy.

Coffee.

I'm a program manager in tech. I mean, like, nothing, absolutely nothing that I learned in school— not to put it down, I had a wonderful schooling time— has come to my rescue in, in my career trajectory.

Anyway, I'm sure that, I'm sure that the Aristotle was useful with those grade 5s and 6s. But no, but seriously, if I can just ask this question, do you feel, from a slightly different perspective, generally, do you feel that the employers themselves have a responsibility responsibility in this? Because I think often it feels that we put a lot of emphasis on, to your point, Rosa, the schools and the counsellors and the, you know, the teachers to be doing career readiness work in curriculum and reaching outside the school to industry and to employers. Might we get to a point, is there any incentive or interest to get to a point where the employers themselves are seeing the value in playing a role in the education, in inverted commas, very broadly of the next generation of, you know, potential employers. I mean, I don't know quite what that means or what that looks like, but I just wonder from that perspective if you see there's any work to be done.

On a personal note, I've actually been researching exactly this because I've been just toying with the idea of plugging a gap which at least in Germany I think exists massively, which is literally, as I said, the lack of opportunities for children between the ages of, let's say, 5 and 14 at least to have digital literacy, electronic music classes, programming classes, things of the sort, parents who want to learn about digital literacy and hygiene and how to be able to allow their children to use things, right? So one way in which employers can do this, especially larger employers, and some of them do, but this comes under corporate social responsibility, right, is let's say that they would fund camps for students. So coding camps, academies, projects, courses. Give you an example. Let's say, let's take a— I can't name companies, but let's say we take a large multinational tech company in Germany, right? They're probably going to have a lot of international people that work for them, they're gonna have local people that work for them, they're going to be, they're gonna have children living in the city with them, you know. So a lot of these companies do, do they do it enough? I don't have enough research on that at the moment. I'm actually trying to do that myself to understand, but that is something that they can do is to sponsor and fund those opportunities for children, especially because they have people in their company that could come there and give a talk, give lectures and things of that sort.

Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. Anthony, has that come up in your employer engagement research?

Well, absolutely. I mean, I think there's— it's probably more important than it has been for generations for employers to be systematically engaged in career development. And I think employers from the smallest SME through to the largest multinational is increasingly seeing the need to do that. But we need to make it easy for them. But I think in terms of, in terms of the need, if you think about some of the big trends which are happening, and you see you're talking about the credential and it's an example of the way that kind of the career journeys of students are becoming increasingly marketized, you know. So we can think about them having to make more and more choices about what they study, where they study, sometimes how much money they're going to spend, what credentials they're going to get. And as that process is happening, it's really important that young people have access to advice they can trust and rely on to understand how to invest their time and their energy. And, you know, the people who are best placed to do that are the people who actually do those jobs and, you know, hire those people. And I think we need to make it easier, you know, for young people to understand this, but also it means to make it easier for, you know, for those— the people in the world of work to communicate to the young people. And we can see the similar way that AI is changing work. I mean, the IT industry is a really interesting one. You know, a lot of people are saying that coding is going to be done by AI, that entry-level jobs are going to get more difficult, you know. But there'll be aspects of, you know, working in IT where there are jobs to be had, lots of jobs to be had. And so So the people who are best placed to be able to provide the advice to young people often are those people who, you know, who do those jobs. And I think it's very convincing. The sociologists sometimes call it hot information rather than cold information, which you might read somewhere. That's something very important that happens when you face some— look at somebody face to face and you know whether you're going to believe them or not. And, you know, underpinning all of this, we see this crazy situation where if if you look across the world, pretty much the generation of young people who are leaving education today are the most educated, most highly qualified, the most years of schooling of any generation in human history. They're also the most ambitious. We kind of know that from PISA. But if you look at their comparative employment rates compared to older people, you know, so we look at the unemployment rate under 25 and over 25, what we find is that ratio is increasing. And if you look at earnings as well as comparison for older people, younger people You know, they have this extensive human capital, better than ever before, but they're struggling to activate it in the labor market. And I think that's something which is really telling, and it gives us like a, a steer for thinking how we in the educational community can help them to better understand, have a confident understanding, and then learn how they can navigate that marketplace well, and then actually activate their skills and their knowledge and their capacities in the labor market once they get to that point.

Thanks.

So to follow up on what Anthony just said, we— so I teach at George Mason University, which is a university here, a public university here in Virginia, about 30,000 students. And we did a design sprint this past fall on this very question about how do we help students activate that massive human capital at the Capitol. And we interviewed students and we interviewed employers. And what, you know, for me, the fascinating thing was employers increasingly are asking for students to have experience, which gets to this question of how do they get experience, this chicken and egg problem when they're in school and schools become more and more intense. So they, you know, it's hard for them to have jobs. And if they do have jobs to earn their tuition, they're often jobs at retail or low-paying jobs, not related to their careers. So what was fascinating to me was that the students really pushed us back to basics about what the problem, the source of the problem is. And for them, it's the motivation to do the networking necessary and create the social capital themselves. I mean, we're all talking here about all these things that students can do. And Anthony, you just said that this generation is more ambitious than any you've seen. I'm not seeing that in my classrooms in Virginia. With, you know, very high-performing students, but they are, and maybe it's the COVID aftereffects, I don't know, but they are not outward looking and, you know, they want people to hand them the job. And I don't mean this, and it's not that they're lazy, they just find it cringeworthy. I don't know if you all use that word, but they find it like unsavory to go sell themselves at a career fair or push their ideas on somebody that they don't know. They want to do everything online. They want to work on chatbots with, you know, to get things done in the world. And so what they've asked when we do a design sprint and ask, what do you need? What do you want? How should we, what services should we give you? The sort of the number one thing that came back was teach us how to network, teach us how to engage with these employers that we don't know in a way that actually motivates us because we're not motivated to go to a career fair. Fair hand somebody a business card or a resume. And because we know we're never going to hear from them. We know that, you know, everyone's now auto-applying for jobs. So employers are getting like 10,000, you know, applications. So they get ghosted. They never hear back. So they're really, they feel kind of disenfranchised by the early career hiring system. And, you know, we brought employers in who said, you know, we have to know you if we're going to think about hiring you. You've got to come meet with us. You've got to get to know us. And, you know, there's a lot of, well, I don't have time.

I'm, you know, I don't really they want to do that.

So, you know, the bottom line here is how do we help them be motivated to get out of their shell to do what they've got to do? Because it is, you know, it takes an intrepid individual to— at this point in the game.

Super interesting just how relational it is, and it's—

that's work.

It's a different kind of work, but yeah, fascinating. Rosa, did you want to come in? And then—

yes, I just want to jump in because of your last question. How do we support them on what they want to do? And one of the things that we found when we polled almost 4,000 students across the world, mainly South America, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. And one of the pieces that we found that was surprising for us is that most of them are looking at the value of entrepreneurship more than working for someone else. And so we found that 72% in all this group, boys and girls, mainly from the classes of who are going to graduate in 2026 and 2027, 7. They value that support, and 45% are looking at higher education or their education with on-hand experience that relates to entrepreneurship. And from this group, 80% believe that entrepreneurship education should be embedded in their studies. So that perception of who's the employer is shifting. And one of the things that we found in these conversations are entrepreneurs who are 12 years old, or to Anthony's point of young people who are so educated, are developing applications that are marketed into solving problems on fires, on detecting situations. And so there is an important piece of bringing back the conversation of who are these students, what are their values, as well. And this is something that we can reflect on, on schools, and we can talk about, well, what do we know from them? What are they telling us? Because they are seeing the shifts in the way of work. Even the working 8 to 5 job to the gig economy, to working on their own, to working for a period of time to experience, like, that's an important value that we're seeing coming from these generations. That is different to the generation of parents. And at some point when we bring conversations of parents, one of the things we ask our schools is to be very aware that the way that a parent is saying, "This is what I do," is important to introduce, "This is what we do now, this, but how is this going to happen? Is this going to be happening in the future?" So once again, this is a generation that has a very unique place in history. They are truly digital natives, to put it in Mark Prensky's words, in an environment of school where their teachers are not necessarily as knowledgeable as they are in the access to technology and to using of it. This is a generation, Kathleen, you mentioned it, that was in grade 3 and 4 when COVID hit. So that developmental piece is again, And is that a gap that they can come back and overcome, or is that a gap that's continuing? But it is a situation that is determining the characteristic of this generation. And also we're seeing that they are orienting themselves away from the traditional markers of prestige. We're seeing that they're purpose-driven, that their career pathways are to solve a problem, are to engage in a better world. I mean, they do have these values that are accompanying their decision-making process. And what we're seeing in the last 5 years is that more and more the selection of what to study, where to study, and why to study is more aligned with personal values. And these are values that are looking at how am I going to make a better world, and putting it in those words, more than maybe the social prestige of the career. And that may not be in alignment with what the traditional way of valuing doing some jobs over others is in the environment. So I would give them a lot more credit in that sense of what they value, how they see themselves, and also in stepping up and doing things that some of their teachers and sometimes schools are surprised, but for them it's like, "Duh." We definitely see that.

We got a lot of those young people that I have the privilege to work with through the Festival of Hope work that I do with IB. And now we see them all over the world. They're absolutely incredible. Absolutely. But Anthony, did you want to come in on that?

I wanted to pick up on Kathleen's question about, I suppose, this preparation for transitions. And I mean, Kathleen, you're in Virginia, and a couple of years ago I did a study in Virginia, and within that we surveyed young adults who've been educated in the state, and we asked them— it's these are young adults, 19 to 26— we asked them, is there anything you wish your school given you more of in terms of your career preparation? And, you know, a lot of them wanted a lot more of everything, but the things which really stood out were some of the— what you might think is really simple things. It's how to get a job, what employers value, how to interview well, how to do a good application. And I think we can see this as, you know, kind of like a resource which some students have and some don't. You know, the sociologists will talk about this as a form of cultural capital, but it's understanding how the rules of the game work in different areas It's different, it's different in medicine as it is in mechanics, as in the hospital and so on. I mean, as you were talking, Kathleen, it reminds me of a really good study by Emma Norris in the UK who looked at students 16 to 18 and found a real difference between those from a working-class background and those from a middle-class background. And the middle-class background kids, they understood the importance of networking. They were quite confident in doing it. The working-class kids felt it was almost cheating, you know, you think you should, you know, you should stand by your own merits. And that was putting them at a disadvantage. So I think what you asked about, you know, what do we do about this? I think one thing which is really important is that we make some of the key activities which you do through particularly secondary education mandatory for students. And we make sure that when they, they're involved in their career development, we try and make as authentic as possible. So when we're doing interviews or application service, we get actually real recruiters into the classroom. They can show them that, you know, I take 30 seconds to read a CV. Thing. You know, if it's not there, if there's spelling mistake on the first line, you're out. You know, these sorts of things, it's very powerful. And then we give them that experience themselves. And I think employers don't want to make mistakes when they hire. And I think that's why, you know, they know that not everybody's got great experience. But if you've got some experience, if you've got a recommendation and worked in the same trade or industry as you, you know, if you've been personally recommended, if you understand the vocabulary, if you dress in the right way, you know, that gives them confidence confidence. And I think that's something which, you know, education systems can do. Career pathway programs can be very good at this, but generally within education, we can be very much, much better in helping students to get to that point where an employer will have confidence in them and will take a chance on them.

Yeah, just a quick add-on. So you talk about what's compulsory and what's optional. Well, one of the recommendations from all of our students was, you know, we're not actually accessing the services. Of what we call, you know, they have in colleges all have career services offices that you can go to to get all that kind of help that you said that those Virginia students needed. At least if you're in a college, any college, they all have it. But the problem is like 75% of students in most colleges in the US don't access those services because that feels, you know, like something, you know, like, what are they going to do for me? And so what the recommendation from Student Affairs One of the things was you need to bake that into our classes and you need to make it mandatory. And then, you know, like if it's important to you, it will be important to us. But anything that you make optional, we don't have time for it. We're work— we've got jobs, we've got classes. So make it mandatory. That was just an interesting design criteria from the students' point of view.

Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Because it— I mean, there's nothing more boring, right, than a mandatory, inauthentic authentic career session run by somebody who doesn't really want to be there, right? Like we've all had them in school. I can really distinctly remember them. So it totally resonates what you're saying is like, how do you meet young people where they are with the questions they have when they have them? And that's incredibly difficult to do, obviously. And I absolutely, the systemic inequities in there is something I wanted to ask you about. So maybe we'll go there. But that piece about authenticity really resonates as well, Anthony. But yeah, just to come back to that, the question of the inequities in the system. I mean, in ESEA you talked about cost and it's come up a few times in the different ways, but it, it, this is a very clear issue. I'm sure it comes out in your research, Anthony, with the OECD and it's, you know, just the compounding effect of having access to not only the good schools, the good education level, but also the cultural capital, as you said, and the different, the other ways of navigating even for Parents, how do I navigate this system? Who are my friends? Who can I bring in to provide internships or work experience opportunities for my kids? You know, there's a compounding effect of people who are already in interesting and, and engaging or jobs that young people might be intrigued by through your social network. You know, there, there's— it just feels that there's a compounding effect of inequity built into that whole system. So again, another challenging question: what do we— how do we counter to that.

I think this is a concern I was also thinking about. And like, for example, just to direct this mildly to Kathleen, I mean, the idea of these kind of modular pathways that, you know, can move forward in sort of these less stuck ways for students. I mean, I throw myself behind this, but a question that keeps coming up for me is how do we keep that from turning into this two-tier kind of system, right? Where you have the people that can get into that kind of pathway pathway versus the people that get shunted off into the alternatives. Let's say I'm the one that works in those alternatives, the boot camps, the courses, the, the workshops. Yeah, actually, in order to get to my point, I would love to hear what you have to say because I think this does connect to what Tim Logan was saying as well, just kind of trying to understand who has access to those and how do those students get access to it in a more practical sense. Because at this point, people come to the places that I work at, these kind of companies, either with government funding, at least in Europe, or they pay for it themselves, or they realize that this is— they don't have enough experience, they don't have enough to show their employer to say, I need to create a program, I want to create a report, I want to come to my employer not just with a degree but with something that I have created, and now I'm going to apply for this job, and they're going to look at the things that I have created rather than where my degree came from or what I studied. And this is more and more becoming the norm in the Middle market for sure. So just to pass it back to you really quickly, like, do you think that there's a way to integrate this so that it's not a split system between those who can kind of do it and those who can't, or those who can afford it and those who can't?

Yeah, well, really, in the US, the, the secondary system, the secondary school system, is sort of the last place where, you know, you have all students, or at least for the most part, theoretically, you have all students. And after that, it does become very hard to to democratize or make sure that everyone is getting access to the same kinds of internships, the same kinds of counseling, which is why I think in the US at least, there is a new focus on high school and kind of rethinking high school for age 14 to 18, because it is an opportunity to offer all students. And I'll give the example that I talk about in my book about New York New York City, they have started pilots where all kids will do an apprenticeship in somewhere 9th to 12th grade, and they're all getting those CTE, the career technical electives that I talked about. Everyone is getting those in these pilot schools. I think it's called Future Ready NYC is the name of the program. And it's a pilot to see, you know, can we pull this off? Because the hard thing has been to offer these services, and particularly when you start to get involved with internships and apprenticeships, offering them at scale. And so I think that one solution is to just begin to integrate these kinds of services and normalize the activity that you have kind of a weave, at least in part of high school, between work experiences and school experiences. You know, it's hard to do. New York City is an easier place to do it, and we can talk about why that is. There are a lot more employers for That's one thing, but that's one model. The other model that I talk about in the book is really something which is easier to do in the US than I think most places. So maybe it's not, you know, universally useful, but it's driven by philanthropy, right? And it's this idea that philanthropy picks up where schools leave off to offer those kinds of wraparound services to, you know, young people who are not going off to college and that the The largest program that I profile in the book is called Year Up, which is worth looking at it, Year Up United, which basically offers a cohort experience that, you know, that Anissa described that sort of that bootcamp experience a year after when you finish secondary school, you go off and do this and you're placed with an employer that they find for you that is relevant to the career that you're starting. And, you know, one young man I interviewed last year, he said, It was like a rocket ship that I could get into this tech company or any company, you know, without going and getting a college degree. And so, you know, those kinds of programs are 100% supported by philanthropy and somewhat by the companies. And so, you know, how do you bring that back into a federal entitlement system, I think is the question for governments.

Yeah, thank you. That's great. The question of parents in— that was kind of embedded in my previous question about inequality as well is also an interesting one. And I do think it's worth just dwelling on that for a minute. You know, what are the kinds of support services now for involving parents in these conversations? Because as many of you have said, it's not— these things are not just happening in formal education institutions, they're also happening at home. A lot of the hot information perhaps, Anthony, that you mentioned is happening in relation relationships at home and with family, friends, etc. So, you know, any of you had any experiences or seen any interesting practice around involving parents in these kinds of conversations?

I'm going to jump in from the school side of, of things because it's very much where we have that visibility. But I needed to tackle a little bit on, on your question of access and equity a little bit before that because it does relate to also parents in that way. One of the things that we have seen mainly from our data, which is countries in the Global South, is that the equity is also very— the access is very much related to the priorities in the sense of if a student has the need for a physical school, for example, then the what to do with life may not be the priority at 13, 14. There may be a tied-in situation which is more embedded. So I would add to the access conversation at all times, what are the needs? What are the priorities? Who are we talking about when, and be very cautious in what population are we talking about when we talk about access and we talk about the opportunities, or is it access to learning? Is it access to technology? Because the approach to every one of these three is different. Issues will vary and will be determined contextually as well. Now, this would bring me more into the conversation of, of the trusted sources for students. And what we have seen in this particular population is that yes, parents, 91% students said their parents were somewhat or very involved. So you will see that more than a teacher, the parents are the ones who are guiding it. And what we have seen happening is empowering teachers in the schools, not just to bring parents to say what is it that they do, but also to bring parents in the conversation of what is happening in the world of work. So that is an alternative, kind of like in the coffee, meet coffee with, which is the typical way of doing it, is integrating a parallel future readiness conversation narrative for parents parents so that not necessarily they come to talk about their jobs, but they can feel a lot more empowered at home to make questions for first their learning. So it's that level of awareness that the way of work has changed, I need to learn with. That is the shift that we're seeing, that the schools can be very effective in bringing parents just for that.

Thank you. Yeah, that's great. Anyone else wanted to—

yeah, no, let me kind of pick up on Rose's point on the parents engaging There's this one program I wanted to highlight from Australia. It's called Little Ripples, and it's designed to help the parents of very young children, age 4, 5, 6, to start talking about, you know, kind of the jobs people do, why they do them, what they're like. Now, the point of the program is not to get these 4-year or 5-year-olds to say, you know, I'm going to do this job or that job, but it's to, to help them to create a culture of curiosity and investigation. From an early age. And I think that's so important because I've got, I've got teenagers like Tim Logan. They get to about 13, 14, you know, they really shut down a little bit. You want to get them early, you want to challenge before they've got all these preconceptions about what's socially acceptable and what's not socially, you know, and so on. So I really like that little Ripples program. They create cards, they suggest, you know, little videos, you know, and conversation points. But so just coming back to this point about equity, there's some really, you know, kind of like shocking figures in the latest PISA data. And we, uh, you know, we published the State of Global Career Preparation earlier this year, and it showed some really, really striking things. But if you look at the educational expectations of students, if you imagine in your class you've got one kid, socially advantaged, very high performer, and sat next to him, very high performing student— we know from the PISA test they're going to do well at university— but they're from a, you know, a working-class background, you know, that we see a 22 percentage points difference between those two types of kids and their expectations of completing university. But if you add in a third kid, and this kid's from, you know, an advantaged social background, but they're a low achiever, and we kind of know from longitudinal studies that if you're performing very low on your PISA test, you're going to struggle in university, they're 8 percentage points more likely to say they'll complete university than the high-performing working-class kid. And we see that's an average. In some countries the gap is huge, some is a bit smaller, but in most countries we see that gap. We ask— many, many students are misaligned in their educational and career aspirations. They want to do a job which requires university education, but they don't expect to go to university. If you're from a socially disadvantaged group, you're 3 or 4 times likely to fit into that group, that you don't understand what you need to do, you don't understand how the education system works, these rules of the game. And, you know, you can look across all students and you think, well, some are going to face greater obstacles than others in being able to achieve what they see as fulfilling career for themselves. And, you know, that's all very personalized, and good, good guidance is very personalized. But there's some very clear, you know, sociological structured issues within this. Gender's there, migrant status, ethnicity, social class is huge within all of this. And what we would hope, just on that last one, is that kids from more disadvantaged social backgrounds get more career guidance than kids from advantaged social backgrounds. But the average across the OECD doesn't show that. They're less likely to engage in guidance activities. There's a good example from Ireland. In Ireland, they've recognized this, so there are some additional barriers, you know, social capital, connections, information, support. And so they give double the funding for schools in the lowest income areas for their career development. And so the first thing is we kind of need to recognize that, you know, it's not a level playing field, that some kids do need more support, and we know we should give them that more support. And, you know, we need to collect the data to see if it's happening or not.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Just, just in the interest of time, perhaps if we could just go around, because I mean, there's a lot of questions, right? There's a lot to do, there's a lot of different stakeholders involved in these conversations, and there's a lot of need in all sorts of ways. And we haven't even got on to anything to do to do with, you know, shifting the way assessment structures prioritize or value a certain type of knowing and doing and skills, etc., versus others. But just perhaps just to wrap up, what would be your, maybe a hope or a particular area that you'd like to see shifting or just, or a particular message you'd like to kind of summarize that you particularly care about with this issue based on what we've said so far?

I am hoping I didn't speak on the employer engagement piece, and I think the biggest contribution employers can make is to show learners and the systems that support them the pathways that are not full degree because they've, you know, employers have expressed displeasure with the sort of the preparation level of students that come out with degrees. And yet they haven't, in most cases, provided the roadmap map of credentials that they would recognize as hiring tools that would be alternatives. In the fields where they have, it's working very well. You know, most of the cases that I describe in my book are related to fields like cybersecurity or, you know, data technicians or healthcare, where employers have gotten together and said, this is how you get hired in this field. And we need employers to do that in many, many more sectors. I think that would be a huge gift from the employer side to help create more multiple pathways at scale that would help democratize. It would help, you know, reduce the angst of families because they could see what does it take to get hired in this role. And AI can help employers do that at this point. And I think that's my sort of low-hanging fruit to suggest to the employer community. Community.

That's great, thank you.

Well, I'll, I'll go next. I think there's 4 things I'd say to the education community and maybe one thing to society in general. And for the education community, in a lot of the kind of the wealthier countries of the world, a lot of middle-income countries now, we do have a careers profession. We have counselors who are responsible for schools or in schools. They're increasingly well trained, and, you know, they vary in the sense of the resources. Sometimes they've got too much to deal with, but we have, we have a system in place. We need to build on that. And I think the first thing is that we need to begin young. Younger. You know, primary is really important, elementary school, where we start creating that culture of curiosity, where we start introducing boys to male nurses to know, well, this is actually a job that men do, and girls too, or female electricians and plumbers. So we start challenging some of those stereotypes about what's natural and acceptable for somebody like me to do. We make sure that the employer engagement is regular and deep. I think a lot of countries don't do that well. We actually listen to the young people. We ask them. So we ask them, you know, what is your expectations? What do you think will be fulfilling for you individually? And do you understand what the education and training routes are? And if they're, if they're not aligned well, will we do something about it? If they're uncertain about this, will we help them? We can get exposed into greater career development because actually decrease the uncertainty. They can always change their minds later. We need them to be actually thinking, having this dialogue between themselves at the moment and their future self. Themselves. And we do, we kind of recognize that some people have greater barriers than others, and social background is really important in this. But for society, I think there's something really interesting. This brings the employers back into the picture, which is in many of the studies which I know and I've been responsible for, we see quite significant wage premiums later on. A young person who's benefited from, you know, from a richer experience of career development, particularly involving employers, can be earning 5 or 10% more, which is often sort of like the equivalent of having an extra year of secondary education.

It's quite substantial.

Substantial. And we asked why that would be. Well, I think it's about, you know, matching an individual better to a place where they can be fulfilled and they can do a good job and they see the purpose of it and they want to do a good job rather than being a job. And if an employer's paying them more, we would assume that they'd be more productive in that role. That's why they're getting paid more. And in our economies at the moment, which are facing stagnation and lots of concerns about growth as well as, as well as equality, we need to think about career development. It's a really important tool, not just for individuals, but for society. If you do it well, everybody wins. And I think if we look around the world, we get a sense that the urgency is greater now, and the need to probably spend a little bit more is greater now than it was 20 or 40 or 50 years ago.

Thank you, Anthony.

Yeah, super interesting.

Yes, I, I would like to talk to— leave my final message to the schools and the teachers in the world who may be listening to this conversation, basically because one of the things that we believe at the Institute Institute is that when we look at career counseling from the perspective of lacking, we will always find what we can't do, what we're not doing. Whereas if we're looking at it from the perspective of what can we do, how can we make lemonade from what we have, there's a lot that schools can do and with whatever resource at, at hand, reach the support that students may need, or at least to to the best of their abilities. So one of the things that we would encourage the schools is to reframe counseling not as somebody's job, but as the school-wide responsibility. So anyone can have an important conversation with students just by incentivizing the curiosity to helping students connect the dots and starting at any age that possibility. Another thing that we would encourage schools to look at is more than focus on jobs, bring the conversation on purpose. Like, what is it that you want to do? What are the problems of the world that you want to solve? Where do you see yourself? Focusing it around the student, like Anthony had mentioned, listen to students and bring back that dialogue to them. And so when schools are approaching it in a different way, and there's a little bit more of awareness that we're all in this together, it is easier to embed postsecondary and career planning within other aspects of school life. And so this would promote holistic, inclusive, sustained, contextualized support for students. And I would just say there is something that can be done. There's always something that we could do better, but I would encourage schools to, to see what they're doing best and continue doing that and communicating that. So I just wanted to leave with that.

Thank you.

Anissa.

I'm, I'm not quite sure how to, how to put this. I think everybody said everything was fantastic, and I wish I had been hearing this conversation when I was in my teens. I guess everybody's discussed the educators and the parents. I'll, if there are by any chance people between the ages of 12 to 25 listening to this podcast, then I will, I will address them. I've been a student in a couple of different countries and a couple of different schooling systems. And then I've worked with school children, and now I've worked with adults. And I think that it is important to hold institutions accountable for what they should be providing us, certainly. But at the end of the day, if we think about jobs so specifically, rather than careers, rather than vocations and professions, we might box ourselves in a little bit. We might lose a little bit of the magic that we all set out to have, that we want to have, is learning how to understand ourselves, what makes makes us tick, kind of learners we are, what, you know, gets us passionate in the morning. I've changed careers twice in my life, and it was tough, but I have zero regrets about it because I realized at some point that I wasn't as passionate about it. The moment I found something that I was passionate about, I excelled at it very quickly. And I think there is a little bit of danger in becoming too specific and too kind of guidance-oriented about making the money and finding the job. But it's a balance. And then finding something that you truly, truly love, that you wake up in the morning and want to regardless of the recession and regardless of your jobs, regardless of how it works. And just, there's, there's a bit of magic to it, right? I mean, I think we're all in these chairs and on these screens right now because a part of what we do still really excites us. It gives us hope. It's something that we wanna do. So I guess if we can start to tell primary school children to find their magic and then secondary school children to figure out how to create the magic, and then kids that are older in university to dissect what the magic looks like behind the magician screen. And then finally, when they actually get to a company, they, they know how to do the show. So I'll end it on— thank you.

I love it, I love it. Beautiful. No, that's a great way to end. Thank you so much, Noah. And I would hope that the education systems more broadly are more holistically or more collaboratively doing exactly that, right? Helping, helping young people just kind of engage in the magic. No, beautiful. Thank you so much. I so appreciate your time and just, yeah, so much expertise. And I'm really— I'm sure this will inspire many people with these conversations. There's a lot of people who are really looking for more guidance, I think, across all of the constituents we've been talking about—parents, educators, school leaders, and young people, of course. So no, just thank you so much for everything you're doing.

So this is super exciting because this is the first time I have ever done this kind of post-conversation reflection, let's say. So, um, really Lovely to have you, Shira, to have this conversation. I shared the audio with you and you've had a chance to listen to the, the conversation that listeners have just heard.

So yes, fun to experiment and do some reflection together.

Yeah, I'm excited to follow up and just think about what our young people need as they head into the future and really dig into the how of that, because I think that's the important part is like how educators and schools are doing this on a day-to-day basis.

For sure. And it should be said, you know, you have done a significant amount of work for a long time in this area and just published Leading Future-Focused Schools: Engaging and Preparing Students for Career Success. So, you know, this is definitely something you've, you've spent a bit of time on. So I would love to, yeah, maybe we can start on, I mean, clearly we traversed a lot of terrain in the conversation. And the thing that I think perhaps we didn't dig into quite as much as we could have done, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you was for a teacher in a school listening to it and thinking, wow, that feels like a lot. I mean, it feels like, you know, on top of all the other things we often pile onto teachers' plates, like, okay, now I've got to be a career coach as well. So maybe we can just, yeah, start with thinking about how do you think about that workload piece for teachers and how they might just, I don't know, some small wins that they could do tomorrow in their classroom.

Yeah. I mean, first, I do think it starts with mindset and the purpose of schooling. And I think that starts with a little bit of a school leader and how they lead their school, right? And so there's something about educators reminding themselves that our role is not just to teach content. I'm not just a math teacher, I'm not just a 4th grade teacher, right? I don't just teach high school science, but we are teaching young people who hopefully are going to be the next generation of people that also take care of our community, young people who are contributing citizens. Citizens who are passionate, who care about themselves and each other, who are self-aware and social— socially aware, then we can start to have it not feel like such an extra lift, right? This is part of what teachers do on an everyday basis, is to help foster the next generation of career professionals, politicians, the leaders of their countries, the leaders in their community. Communities. And I think on a day-to-day basis, if we think about it as something extra and something we have to make time for every single day as a set aside, then it will always feel like a lot. And so there's something about creating and helping educators build a future-focused mindset that then shows up in their classroom in some ways that could be these kind of easy lifts that you just mentioned, right? And So some of the easy lifts I think about are things like young people holding jobs in a classroom, jobs that match their strengths, jobs that allow them to explore skills, jobs that help a teacher operate a more smooth classroom. I was a middle school teacher, middle school math teacher, and if I was working harder than those kids, we had a problem. And so young people were helping me to write objectives on the board and hand out papers and even helpers, right? Or welcome people at the door. I always had a number line check-in that young people had to check in on, and so someone was facilitating that, right? Everybody had a job, and that job wasn't just about like making sure they could help me in the moment. It was about also fostering things for the future. And so that's one way. Another way is using this language of professionalism with young people, with our students, right? Instead of calling them students, maybe we call them reporters when they're working on an assignment that includes interview. Maybe refer to them as analysts when they're in the classroom and they're analyzing some, you know, numbers or data, right? And so we can use some professional language with our students on an everyday basis that just gives them hope for the future, right? I can be an analyst. I can be a reporter. I can be a scientist, and having some of that language can be really, really important.

Yeah, and definitely, I mean, it made me think about what Anissa was talking about with the project management piece, because I think that whole idea of, you know, the kinds of language that our young people have about what their future might hold for them, the narratives around that are based on things that they're familiar with. They're not necessarily, you know, doctor, lawyer, engineer, the kinds of things that come up as I think Anthony said, you know, a certain, a certain small set of job titles, right? But the idea of breaking that down into roles and responsibilities like analyst, reporter, project manager, you know, facilitator, those kinds of things give a different kind of language to young people, which I think is quite useful in helping them self-reflect on what they're good at and what they're passionate about, maybe.

Yeah, 1000%, right? And also mimics the real world. When's the last time you walked into a place of employment and there there was literally the boss was standing there giving very clear directions to orchestrate, you know, each person. That's not what's happening in the real world. In the real world, people are working together. Maybe you don't even— at looking at a group, you might not know who the boss is, right? And they're working together, they're problem solving, they're becoming flexible or adaptable based on individuals' needs, they're managing their own time, right? And so when we're also making these these specific roles in our classroom, we're naming how important they are, and we're not setting aside time, 45 minutes, to say, "Today we're going to do a lesson on time management." We might be taking 2 minutes to reflect at the end of the activity on how each group managed their time. We might be setting an expectation or sharing a little bit in the beginning about some ways they might make sure that that 15 minutes they have to work on this activity is productive, right? And so it's almost these like micro moments of doing these things that allow our students to help themselves not just become good, good at math or good readers, right? They're becoming good people, people with executive functioning, people who have life skills, people who can work with other people, right? These are, are skills that employers— and in the audio I just listened to, talked about a lot, right? That it's not about the reading and the math and the science, it's about these other skills. They're so— whether they're— we can call social-emotional skills, durable skills, 21st century skills, cross-sector skills is what I call them, because they're needed in every course and every sector.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And just building that kind of the detail and the honesty and the authenticity of self-reflection and metacognition and those things just are so— I think that's just so important in helping people, any, any age people actually, but to, to kind of grow into a sense of themselves, who they are, what they care about, about, and you know, that kind of, as you say, naming that and giving that some actual explicit language that they can use, or, or even just forming habits around— that's the kind of conversation we do value in this, in this learning space— is like, I think it's, it's really important.

Yeah, and, and it's really that first phase of a career development continuum, right? We don't just say to first graders, who do you want to be when they grow up? And think that what they say is what's gonna happen, right? It might be okay to ask ambitious questions like that, but what's more important is to foster their identity, their own awareness, their passions, their interests, right? Because what we actually don't know is what careers are going to be out there. And so we can expose them to things we know, but we also have to recognize that what's more important is fostering these skills and naming these skills so that later on they can look at what careers might match these skills. And even in— and they're out of our classrooms and beyond us, they recognize, remember, I got really good at problem solving in 4th grade, and when— because I did that, I ended up, you know, on the chess team, and I started playing these new activ— you know, a part of these new games, right? There's these seeds that we're planting on an everyday basis. Super interesting. That's really that first part, right?

Because it's just like story building, personal story building about who I am and what I can contribute in the world. And it, I mean, also made me think of Anthony, you talked about the Little Ripples program in Australia, that kind of fostering that curiosity for just what is going on in the world and how can I, how maybe I can fit to that or contribute to that. I think is, you know, yeah, feels important as well.

Yeah. I mean, one of my top values is around opportunity and not because I'm trying to get opportunities, but because I believe in opening opportunities for others. And I believe that us as educators educators have to help young people by maybe like cracking that door a little bit to the opportunity so that they can get in the door. And I believe that one of those opportunities is by engaging them in, in programming and instruction that allows them to see their impact in the community and to give back, right? And so you and I have talked about service learning. Yeah, right. Really passionate about that. And it's a teaching and learning strategy strategy that allows us to connect what students are learning to ways they can connect that to giving back in the community, to providing advocacy, to doing some sort of service. And that strategy can be something that teachers integrate. Again, it's not about finding something new for them to learn about. It's about connecting their learning to the real world in a way that they feel an impact. And you can start as, as small as on a very local level of a classroom or a school school or within their families, right? And so that strategy is something else that teachers can do, is by connecting service opportunities to the learning happening in their classroom so that students can start to see that their voice matters and that they have the strength to give back in their community and to have an impact.

Yeah, no, totally.

And it, it makes me also think of Carol Sanford, who sadly has passed on now, but who I had on podcast last year, and she talks about participating in the value-adding process. And I just come back to that all the time. I think that's such an important feeling of like, these are not separate things. It's just how do we contribute to the value-adding process of life in locally, or whether that's career-related, professional, in our church group, in our religious community, in our, you know, a sports club, it almost doesn't matter. But there's a sense of like, I'm participating in something and I have a role here, and what am I being asked, and how do I just, you know, how do I get involved?

Yeah, and it helps young people to start recognizing their strengths, and it helps us as adults to start seeing them as an asset and starting as a value added to our community, which in so many places that's not the case, right? Young people are a burden. They're doing wrong things on the weekend, right? They're not graduating. Well, that's not a you problem, that's an us problem. And So we can also start using a strengths-based approach when we're working with our students. We start from, right, even the student who got a 50 on their math exam, we can— guess what? They got 50% right. What 50% did they get right? Let's start there. And I, I think as adults, that's our responsibility to curate lessons and activities and strategies that help young people see their strengths as a really strengths-based approach to to, you know, them figuring out who they are and who they can be in the future. Yeah, no, totally.

And how did you feel about— because there was quite a bit of the conversation that then straight into engaging with employers in the conversation, or parents, or, you know, thinking about going outside of the school and think, you know, what are the roles of the community and other stakeholders in that process of helping those young people?

Yeah, well, you know, our company Innovate started with a mission of continuity of learning and inclusive opportunities for all young people by building the capacity of adults to implement innovative and courageous or innova-jous solutions in education. And it started during COVID right? And so we actually started with this short-term mission of like, we're going to help you move online, we're going to help provide professional development, we're going to help out-of-school-time programs figure out how to not just throw their hands up and say like, we're not offering programs. Right? But over the years, continuity of learning and inclusive opportunities has changed in our mission because we actually believe that education is not just about school. Education is about afterschool programs. It is about workforce development. It's about what's happening during the summer. It's what's happening in religious organizations or community-based organizations and even at home. And so if we come to the table with that perspective, that education is not just what happens from, you know, 8 to 3 or during the school day, thing on their responsibility and their shoulders, then we can start to think about the important role that communities and families play, which can, you know, start at something as simple as like a connection, right? I've made a connection with you. We know who we— you are. We know what you do. Maybe I've shared that with my students, but we can extend that all the way to co-planning and co-facilitating educational initiatives, to setting goals with our community partners partners around what we want students to achieve and making that everyone's job to work towards that. And so when we start thinking about like that, we not only think about families as partners, but we think about workforce development, we think about our local businesses because this is where our students are going. And so if we can work to coordinate programming with them, to coordinate or, you know, even understand what students need, if we can send teachers out to the workforce, right, to look at what's what's going on, then we can also make sure that this is everybody's job. This is a shared responsibility of the entire community to educate young people.

Nice. Yeah, I mean, I 100, 1,000% agree with that sense of the breadth of what education actually is, even though we, we situate it in school and university in this very formal, narrow way. But also, I would say, as a teacher in those institutions, it sometimes feels difficult to get outside the walls, right? It feels like, oh, I've got to do the risk assessments, getting them out on a trip, getting the parental signature, you know, all of the kind of the barriers to doing that is also a challenge to then making those broader links into community, right?

Yeah, it's interesting. So I think two things come to mind. Number one, what comes to mind is like many schools right now are also— they recognize this effort, and so they might have somebody that helps to do some of that coordinating or has a partnership list. But I also recognize, like, partners don't need to be there in person. I used to run these speaker days and panels for young people, and one of our biggest COVID keepers is that we can have community members into our classrooms and our students into the community virtually, right? A plumber that brings a camera to come to our career day virtually and is on site, right? Or a dentist who says, hey, I'm actually gonna use a camera and get in someone's mouth so you can see some of the things that I'm doing and how I fill a cavity virtually is way more powerful than them sitting in front of young people telling them how they got to be a dentist, right? And so let's not forget that there is this virtual world. There is organizations creating videos, there are virtual field trips, there's ways to Zoom people in. So let's not forget about that, which can be an easier lift both for teachers and for employers and community members, you know, wanting to participate. And so that's something that we just wanted to name.

That's super interesting because it also, while you clearly miss the, the in-person physical relationship building, you do get this kind of contextual experience as a young person. Then as you say, you're are like seeing what does it mean to work on site as a plumber and see how, you know, how things move, who's around, what's going on. And you get a kind of more detailed sense of the context in which this person works, which if they're coming into the school, they can't bring with them. They might bring some photos or, you know, but actually just seeing them in context, I think is also super interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we can find diverse ways to engage community and to engage our teachers. Teachers in, you know, learning more. And that doesn't have to be in person. You know, I, I have— maybe you saw this, but there was this video of a teacher who asked all of her students what they wanted to be when they grew up, and then she used AI to create pictures of them in these roles like 20 years later. And I just thought it was so inspiring. And again, she didn't have to reach out to any doctors to get doctors' coats for kids to try on, right? But kids standing with the pictures of themselves, you know, years later as the lawyer, as the construction worker, as the engineer was like very cool. And there was no additional like interaction with— Yeah, that's fun.

That is fun. And maybe just, just to end on a final note with, with this whole bearing in mind, I've, you know, brought all these amazing, wonderful people together to talk about career pathways. There is also this slight tension for me in that I do not feel that's what education is fundamentally about, right? And I think, you know, from what you've said, I think I can sense probably you, you agree, but clearly there's a need. But this idea of the kind of formal education system being the pipeline into industry, whatever sector that is, is a, you know, is a kind of an industrial legacy that I'd also quite like to leave behind in some ways. So I don't know, how do you hold that tension when you're doing doing this work?

Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting. Our team has worked across the country in the United States and with many schools, and sometimes we work with schools where one school has a lot of funds and the other school down the street does not, and that has weighed heavy on our hearts. And so I think one of the ways that we've done that is, you know, we start thinking about when we're in schools, what are the lessons learned and what do we believe that schools need beyond this foundational purpose and practice of making sure that young people are educated, which we're not even going to define at this time. But what we believe is that there's these opportunities to build these entrepreneurial mindsets, to build human-centered wellness, to build a community focus, and to make sure that everyone has global empathy, right? And so for us, we kind of toe this line of recognizing like what the foundational need is of schools, but also what is important for schools to be doing so that our future is secure and positive and productive and solid, and every young person has a path to their future. And so I think those are things that, that we do, and we consistently are providing and producing new resources on that that you can find on our website so that we can feel confident that schools don't just feel this tie to one thing, but also recognize that they have this role in these other pieces. As well. Yeah.

No, I love it. Well, thank you.

I'm, I love that you were willing to dive into this experimental reflection, little kind of, of course, of the, of the conversation. And I'd really appreciate your work and thanks to Kwame for, for making the connection with us as well. And no, just thank you so much for, for everything you're doing.

And yeah, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversations for sure.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Episode, please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog, or on social media, or within your own networks.