Not a popular plan…
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A charity (the Education and Employers Taskforce) surveyed a load of teenagers to find out their career ambitions. Speech Therapist is not a popular choice. 13-14 year-olds rated speech therapy equally appealing as call centre work, and less so than shop work or waiting tables. Older teenagers were slightly more open to the career, but only slightly.
Teacher and Psychologist, however, were both highly preferred careers, the top two in the 17-18 years group. I mention this because, when I was planning to move on from support work, the paths I considered were teaching, psychology, nursing (also quite popular), and speech and language therapy. I thought of these careers as having quite a lot in common, really. So why do the young people disagree?
Maybe they don’t actually know what a speech and language therapist does. If they’ve seen the King’s Speech, they are likely to think it’s mostly about trying a load of stuff and then some of it magically working. No wonder they think it’s about as interesting as call centre work, then. Or maybe there was a kid in their class at primary school who used to say ‘wabbit’ and then started saying ‘rabbit’, because they went to speech therapy and ‘played some games’.
What that actually means is that somewhere was a speech therapist so skilled that she (or he) managed to work out why the child was saying ‘wunning’, teach them to say ‘running’, and then get them to realise that the same thing applies to ‘rabbit’, and throughout this process keep the child so engaged that they just thought they were playing. Never a dull day, in speech therapy.
So maybe, if teenagers knew what their options actually involved, it would be easier for them to choose a career. I don’t think that’s the whole answer, though. When I was a teenager, I did actually look into the career and thought about going into it straight from school. I’m glad I didn’t, though. I’ve really enjoyed having the freedom to just nip off and be a farmer for a few months because I felt like it, or take hours of dance and drama classes every week because my job wasn’t very tiring and required no planning. And now that I’m ready for a change – hey presto! I’m changing.
I don’t think it’s fair that we’re still letting teenagers think they have to choose a career before they leave school that they will be stuck with for the rest of their life. Clearly, they don’t have the information they need, and also it’s not true anyway. Instead, let’s prepare them to create their own varied, interesting career and learning paths over the rest of their working lives.
(photo credit: Amazon.co.uk)