By Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills
If the measure of a society is how well it equips its young people to write their own life stories, then our new report, The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation, is a wake-up call. Drawing on the voices of around 700 000 15-year-olds, the study, developed in collaboration with the Education and Employers charity and Amazon, shows that many students aspire to get top jobs, but lack a clear pathway to the qualifications and skills required to get them.
Career uncertainty among 15-year-olds is at crisis levels. At the turn of the century barely one in four teenagers failed to name a job they expected to hold by age thirty. Across the OECD, 39% of students now sit in the “don’t know” column, the highest share ever and a sharp jump since 2018. Uncertainty matters because it breeds hesitation: young people who cannot picture their future are less likely to invest effort in the present – and longitudinal research shows that they enter adulthood with weaker employment prospects.
Yet having a plan is not enough if the plan is misaligned. Fifty-eight percentof students who state a career goal expect to work as professionals – doctors, engineers, lawyers and the like – even though those jobs account for a far smaller slice of national workforces. Remarkably, one student in five expects a professional career while also saying they will stop their education after upper secondary school, a combination that statistical evidence links to poorer labour-market outcomes. When everyone queues for the same doors, many are bound to be disappointed.
Perhaps most troubling is how unevenly opportunity is distributed. The report shows that socio-economic background exerts a stronger influence on educational ambition than academic ability. Among high-performing pupils, those from the lowest socioeconomic quartile are 22 percentage points less likely to plan on completing tertiary education than their more affluent peers. Flip the comparison and the picture is even starker: a low-performing teenager from a wealthy family is more likely to aim for university than a top-scoring student from a poor one. In other words, talent is universal, but its translation into aspiration is anything but.
These signals – rising uncertainty, growing career and education misalignment and persistent social gradients – form a consistent message. Young people are not short of dreams; they are short of reliable, personalised information about how the labour market is changing and what it will take to thrive in it.
The good news is that effective career development has a proven track-record of lifting outcomes and can be scaled at modest cost. Evidence from ten countries shows that 15-year-olds who take part in a range of guidance activities, including workplace visits, job fairs, career talks and conversations, which bring them into direct contact with employers and people in work, are significantly more likely a decade later to be in work, earning higher wages and feeling satisfied with their jobs than their peers. This is in part because they made better-informed educational choices along the way.
Many employers are eager to support these kinds of approaches, which can sharpen recruitment pipelines and positively impact staff attitudes, with many already volunteering time or opening their doors to schools.
Amazon’s Career Tours is a good example: through live, interactive virtual visits, pupils can question software engineers, logistics specialists and robotics technicians in real time, gaining an insider’s view of roles they might otherwise never encounter. Inspiring the Future, a programme available in the UK, New Zealand and Iceland, is another. It begins with a simple question for employers and people in work: would you be willing to give an hour a year to speak to students in a local school about the job you do? With thousands of potential volunteers available, it is quick and easy for schools to find the right people to support the needs of different learners.
When schools weave real-world encounters into the curriculum, and personalise advice early and often, they give young people not just information but the social capital and self-efficacy needed to turn qualifications into opportunity, shrinking socio-economic gaps and supplying the skilled workers that dynamic, digital and green labour markets now demand.
The policy lesson is clear. Good guidance cannot be an optional extra tacked on at the end of schooling; it must be woven through the fabric of learning, beginning in primary school and delivered most intensely where the need is greatest. That is how the high-performing systems celebrated in PISA turn the raw material of youthful curiosity into human capability. When we help teenagers link effort today to opportunity tomorrow, we do not just fill vacancies in the economy – we enlarge the space in which each of them can imagine, and then build, a fulfilling life.
