What Schools Get Wrong about Career Day

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Chances are you remember some type of career day at school. There may have been parents coming in to talk about their jobs. Other approaches involve asking students to research a career and presenting what the job entails. While well intended, the approach has significant limitations and needs to be changed. The good news is only small changes are needed to have a big impact on the value it provides.

When we do a traditional career day, Johnny’s mother comes in and talks about how as a doctor she takes care of sick people. Susie’s dad then speaks about being an accountant and helping people do their taxes and managing their business expenses. At the end of this exercise there’s the implied questions: Do you want to be a doctor? Do you want to be an accountant? These have binary answers, yes or no.

Let’s start with what it does well: it provides a breadth of jobs. This is important, and it's especially important for younger children in primary education. The goal with younger students is to expose them to possibilities they may never have heard of. All kids know about teachers and doctors. They may not know what a civil engineer is, or a retirement specialist. At this age traditional methods do work sufficiently well. The goal is to provide a wide range of roles, with only the most basic of details (appropriate to younger students) to help them start to be excited about a future opportunity and potentially explore more. Ideally, at the end of this activity students can write down a few jobs that sound interesting so parents and teachers can encourage further investigation.

When it comes to secondary education, however, this is not sufficient. By high school students are already starting to think about careers. They may not yet know what they want to do, which is fine, but they are beginning differentiation. Students will start to take electives, explore colleges or vocational paths after graduating, and consider career interests, even if not specific careers.

What we don’t traditionally get in the presentations is what the job actually involves. Even a six-year-old knows that doctors take care of sick people. What the six-year-old doesn’t know, and unfortunately even a sixteen-year-old doesn’t know, is that being a doctor isn’t just about taking care of sick people. It means, for a typical doctor in private practice, a lot of paperwork. (Ask your doctor how much time each day they spend doing paperwork, and how much they like it.) It also means running a small business including hiring and managing staff, dealing with overhead (office, equipment, insurance, CMEs), and marketing to patients. Heck, medical school barely teaches this stuff (and even then, only a little and only recently).

Take lawyers as another example. Everyone knows what a lawyer does because every generation has had at least one TV show about lawyers, such as Perry Mason, L.A. Law, Ally McBeal, Suits, and omnipresent Law & Order (ok, that’s only half about law, but it’s equally important to the other half). Some might point out that these shows aren’t really about law and are not very accurate. Suits was more about how to be unethical without getting caught and political office infighting. L.A. Law was quirky people and cases and interpersonal dynamics (often love triangles). Ally McBeal, mostly about love and drama. Still, we all know it’s lots of courtroom drama, right?

Wrong. They don’t show what the legal profession is really about that because you can’t handle the truth! We live in a world that has documents, and those documents have to be redlined by people with law degrees. Who’s gonna do it? You? These lawyers have a more mundane job than you can possibly fathom. You cheer for Harvey Specter, and you curse your legal invoice. You have that luxury, you have the luxury of not doing what lawyers do-–that spending hours each day reviewing legal precedent, while boring, probably saves money; and their existence, while boring and mundane to you, prevents legal liability.

The fact is most lawyers hardly ever set foot in a courtroom. There’s no dramatic reveal, no tension. Most lawyers spend their days reviewing documents and looking up legal precedent. When not working by themselves they’re in meetings with clients or opposing counsel doing things equally undramatic.

This isn’t shown to you because it’s not telegenic. An accurate legal TV show would be mostly the camera pointing to someone sitting in front of her computer for hours on end. (Sure, the streaming services need more content, but I don’t think we’re there yet.) When a lawyer comes into career day, she’s not going to emphasize that part; more likely she emphasizes the outcome (e.g., “I help people create contracts so they can do business”).

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They don’t show what the legal profession is really about that because you can’t handle the truth! We live in a world that has documents, and those documents have to be redlined by people with law degrees. Who’s gonna do it? You? These lawyers have a more mundane job than you can possibly fathom. You cheer for Harvey Specter, and you curse your legal invoice. You have that luxury, you have the luxury of not doing what lawyers do-–that spending hours each day reviewing legal precedent, while boring, probably saves money; and their existence, while boring and mundane to you, prevents legal liability.

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The better alternative to the existing approach is to speak about what actually happens in the jobs. Yes, speak about the consequences like helping sick people but also talk about the day to day. Speak about having lots of meetings, or a few meetings. Talk about how much time is spent on the road, and while it’s exciting to go to new cities it can also be difficult to be away from home. Share how much work you do by yourself, or with others. Explain if you spend lots of time looking at spreadsheets or meeting new people. Get into the specific tasks and how often you do them; talk about how your day is spent.

The question to then ask the students at the end of the session is not, “Do you want to be a doctor, yes or no?” but rather, “What parts of different jobs sounded like something you’d like to do or something you want to avoid?” or “What do you see as the part and worst part of being this type of doctor?” This is a subtle but important difference.

In some cases, it may be that the presenter’s role is different from others in the industry. A corporate lawyer is very different from a prosecutor. Depending on which lawyer comes into the room some people may be excited or not about that job, even though other types of lawyers may do something very different. In other cases, it’s because none of the jobs may be a perfect fit, but then can help the student explore his interests.

I think of this as looking at the unit vectors. Instead of asking, “Is this job right for you?” you’re asking things like: "How much do you want to travel for your job?” “Do you prefer more solo or team-based work?” “How much time in front of a computer each day?” “What percentage of your work time should be outside the office?”

Consider someone who is mechanically inclined. She may like what she hears from the car mechanic who brought in some car parts and showed how he fixed it. But at the same time, she prefers to be outdoors (which the nature guide spoke about) and likes to travel which the auto mechanic doesn’t do (travel was not mentioned in a job that day, but she knows this about herself). Now she knows she wants a mechanical-oriented job that involves working part of the time outside of an office and has some amount of travel. Asking around over the coming weeks she might discover jobs like wind turbine repair, a career with the US Navy, and product researcher for an agricultural manufacturing company.

No one with those jobs were at career day. But now, instead of picking between the dozen jobs that were mentioned, she can take the three or four components of each job and combine them to discover what sounds good among hundreds of possibilities. She doesn’t need to know the name of the job; she just needs to know what it involves. Then guidance counselors, teachers, parents, and others, can help direct her to specific roles to explore more.

As always, not all students will know. That’s ok.  Even knowing what you don’t want helps. Perhaps a student only knows that he likes working with computers; that’s something. Another may feel that she doesn’t like jobs with lots of travel. Great, that rules out some options and directs her towards jobs without travel. Students can even write down their anti-jobs, the job they would hate most.

The key, whether it’s the job they do or don't want, is to look at the why and understand what makes it interesting (or not). An airline pilot and management consultant may not sound very similar but if you have a student who expresses an interest in spending most of the time on the road and likes following a process or methodology, both could be a potential fit. Then it becomes a question of whether he prefers a more mechanical, more independent, and less corporate role (pilot) or more meetings and corporate feel, but perhaps also more big picture and strategic (management consultant).

The good news is that this is not a big change. The same people and the same time commitment is used on career day. The key is simply to ask presenters to get a little more detailed about how they spend their days, even the mundane parts, and talk about why they like, or don’t like certain parts of their jobs. Then at the end ask students to look not at the specific job titles, but the job activities and to effectively create their own jobs. For the students, making up your own job sounds more exciting, as well as being more effective.