Since beginning my GCSEs in Year 10 at secondary school, I’ve been focusing on where I want to be and what I want to do when I leave school. I’m currently in sixth form now and have a lot of options ahead of me.
At school, we needed something to work towards; a goal. With the help of certain partners, my school’s attempt in guiding us in the right direction didn’t go down as a success in my opinion.
As a 17 year old in sixth form, I have a lot of options available. I’ve wanted to pursue a number of different careers, from being a physiotherapist to a primary school teacher and even a professor in linguistics. My choice has changed a lot over the years. We all want success, don’t we?
The main aspiration of any young person is to be successful because realistically, we all want to live a good lifestyle when we’re older, but we can only get there through working hard and getting the most out of our jobs. There was help at school for us to discuss our ideas about the future, but how are we meant to discuss the future when we have no idea where we want to go?
Towards the end of Year 11, I still had no idea what I wanted to do so I approached the careers advisor in my school, but I left feeling more panicked than when I walked in! Should we really have to know what we want to do with our lives at such a young age? At the time it seemed like life was moving at 100 miles per hour. I had to make important decisions that were going to change my life in such a short space of time. The best advice I got was to take my A Levels in subjects that I enjoyed studying so I’d have a wider range of options by the time I came out of sixth form. Overall, the advice I was getting from careers advisors was very generic.
Towards the end of my first year at sixth form, I narrowed down jobs that I could see myself succeeding in and, importantly, enjoying. These included speech therapy or maybe even PR. We had a careers week, where different employers came into our sixth form to tell us about their careers and how they got there. The range of different job roles was limited, however. For example, there were mainly bank managers, HR directors and doctors, so the choice of careers was narrow and they weren’t relevant to anything I wanted to do. Although I did find it interesting listening to the employers’ career journeys, I don’t think it has contributed to my decision about my future.
Overall, I don’t think careers advice that I’ve previously received has been suited to me. The thing that has helped the most into helping me make a decision was to weigh up the pros and cons of the different paths I could take. Deciding between going to university or doing an Apprenticeship is a big one. I need to think about what option is best for me. What I really need is something that tells me the routes I could take on the way to my perfect career.
NCFE have launched CareerHow, a website dedicated to giving learners between 14-19 guidance on pursuing their dream career. CareerHow focuses on the ways learners can follow a vocational path, rather than one that is purely academic. It helps us understand what we can do with our existing qualifications, and what qualifications we need to bag that dream job. This will really help motivate young people and help us understand how to get on the path to the career we want.
