Teaching is the most popular profession amongst pupils according to our recent survey of over 2,000 secondary school pupils.
The survey found that 90% have some ideas on the careers they want to pursue when they are older, and teaching is the most popular choice, with 18.8% of the vote.
This is the first year that computer game designers and YouTubers have been named by numerous teenagers in our survey as careers they are interested in. The world of work is really changing, and it is exciting to see that teenagers in the UK have a wide variety of ambitious career ideas.
Athletes are in second place, with 15.6% of pupils saying they would like to be a footballer, tennis player, Olympian etc.
Being a doctor has fallen to third place from first place last year with 14.8% saying they would like this career. However 4.8% said they would like to be a midwife, so medicine is still a popular career choice. Acting is the career of choice for 13.3%.
New to the top ten this year are photographers (13.2%), computer game designers (12.2%), fashion (buying/designing) (10.9%) and business owners (10.9%).
Gone from last year’s top 10 are musicians (10.8%), vets (10.7%), chefs (9.2%) and police officers (8.6%).
When asked why they want to do their preferred job, only 16% say they want to earn lots of money, almost half (46%) said ‘to be able to do something interesting’, and 15% said to do something they would be good at.
If their chosen career was not in the list, teenagers were asked to name it. A third of the participants chose to do this, and the top ten careers from the unprompted responses (in order of preference) were singer, psychologist, YouTuber, zoo keeper, forensic scientist, dentist, computer programmer, beautician, archaeologist, and child care worker.
There were some very specific career choices with one teenager wanting to be a marine biologist, another a bodyguard and another a palaeontologist.