“What do you want to become?” is the wrong first question

Ask any fourteen-year-old in the country what they want to become and you will get an answer. Doctor, engineer, IAS, chartered accountant, and lately something with computers. The answer arrives quickly because it has been asked so many times that a reply had to be prepared. What almost never happens is the question underneath it: on what basis?

The question is not unfair because the child is too young. It is unfair because of its order. It asks for a conclusion at the point in the process where no evidence has yet been gathered. A student at that age has been measured on subject marks and on almost nothing else. They have not been told how their reasoning compares with anyone else's, what kind of task holds their attention for two hours rather than ten minutes, or where their patience runs out. They are being asked to select an occupation using information nobody has given them.

What the question is standing in for

Behind “what do you want to become” there are usually four separate questions bundled together, and they have different answers.

• What am I like? — the question of aptitude, interest, personality and working style
• What is out there? — the question of what occupations actually exist and what they involve day to day
• What connects the two? — the question of which of those occupations would suit someone like me
• What do I do on Monday? — the question of subjects, entrance examinations, courses and deadlines

Only the last of those has a deadline attached. That is why it swallows the other three. The stream form has a date on it; self-understanding does not, so it gets postponed indefinitely, which in practice means it never happens at all.

Why the order matters more than the answer

A decision reached in the wrong order can still turn out well. Plenty of people picked a stream on their father's advice and did excellently. The problem is that when it goes wrong, nobody can say why, because there was no reasoning to inspect. The student cannot revise a decision they never made on any stated grounds. They can only reverse it, which is expensive at seventeen and much more expensive at twenty-four.

When the order runs the other way — profile first, options second, choice third — something useful happens even if the student ends up exactly where they would have ended up anyway. They now hold the reasoning. If the course turns out to be wrong, they can go back to the reasoning and see which part of it failed, rather than concluding that they are simply not clever enough.

A better first question

The first question is not about becoming. It is about noticing. What kind of problem do you not mind sitting with when it is not going well? Not what you enjoy — enjoyment is easy to report and unreliable — but what you tolerate. Tolerance for a particular kind of difficulty predicts more about a working life than enthusiasm does, because every occupation is mostly its difficult parts.

That question cannot be answered by the student alone either, which is the second thing usually missed. It needs an instrument that compares them with others of their age, because a student has no way of knowing whether their own experience of a task is unusual. It needs someone to read the result with them, because a score is a piece of information and not an instruction. And it needs the family in the room, because the decision will be made in a family whether or not the family is invited.

Ask a student what they want to become and you get a rehearsed answer. Ask them what they are like, and give them the means to find out, and the answer to the first question tends to arrive on its own — later, quieter, and far more durable.