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A second grader in Norway drew a YouTube logo when my colleagues and I asked what they wanted to be when they grow up. When we asked why, the child explained that YouTubers are famous and make lots of money.
When we asked second graders in Wisconsin this same question, we were surprised to often receive similar answers: Kids there also wanted to be YouTube influencers when they grow up.
I am a scholar of career and technical education. Since 2021, colleagues and I have spoken with a range of elementary, middle and high school students as young as 7 years old in the U.S. and Norway in 2024 to understand how children imagine their careers.
Our forthcoming research shows that social media has emerged as one of the biggest influences for young people’s career choice, second only to family, friends or teachers.
Over 60% of middle and high school students we surveyed from 2021-2024 said they wanted to be social media influencers or picked their future careers based on what they saw online. Other popular choices were professional soccer player, musician and actor.
Artur Debat/iStock Photos
Our process
In a separate January 2018 international study by the organization Education and Employers, 20,000 children, ages 7 to 11, were asked about their possible future careers and then explained how they learned about that job.
We decided to use a similar approach to understand children’s career dreams and influences.
In Wisconsin, we surveyed more than 80 different children, ages 7 to 11. We also conducted focus groups with more than 140 middle and high school students about their academic and career plans and what influenced their ideas.
We then conducted interviews in Norway with over 60 children in the same age range.
In both places, we gave kids simple prompts that included “When I grow up I would like to be … .” We also asked them, “How do you know about this job?”
We found that there is a disconnect between how schools are helping kids think about their possible future careers and what factors are actually influencing young people as they imagine their futures.
Influencer dreams
In some instances, students as young as 7 in Wisconsin and Norway simply drew the YouTube or TikTok logo, or wrote that they aspired to be an “influencer” without any idea of who or what they would influence.
They shared that YouTubers and influencers “gets lots of money” and that “they want to be famous.”
Students also drew pictures of footballers, musicians, actors and princesses. Some students shared career goals like becoming a wildlife biologist, pilot, engineer or filmmaker.
Older students were more likely to mention careers like nurse, electrician, engineer, teacher, welder, police officer and small-business owner – although becoming an influencer and content creator remained a common aspiration for teenagers and children.
We found that social media also had a positive influence on some students.
One student in a rural town said that online posts and videos encouraged them to want to become a marine biologist, even though the closest ocean is over 1,300 miles – or 2.09 million meters – away.
The limited role of schools
It’s common for middle and high school students to take online career interest surveys to help understand which jobs could be a good fit. Many schools also offer career fairs and job shadowing opportunities.
Most students, though, receive very limited individualized guidance on career paths from a school counselor.
But they generally do receive some kind of prompts to help them think about what sort of career they want.
Within roughly the past decade, 27 states began requiring personalized, multiyear educational plans that helps students as young as 11 years old develop their own education and career goals.
In 2015, for example, Wisconsin passed a new law that required school districts to provide academic and career planning services to students in grades 6 through 12. Students take an online career survey each year.
The students answer questions about their interests, and the online program then names a recommended career. The list typically includes traditional jobs like electrician or accountant, rather than something more modern, like content creator.
One potential reason is that many of the online career-planning programs schools use were created before social media became a central part of young people’s daily lives.
Some schools also have classes where high school students learn about different educational pathways and jobs. Yet these classes often meet only periodically, while high school students typically use social media every day. As a result, formal career education increasingly competes with a constant stream of online messages about work, success and the future.
Our focus groups with middle and high school students in Wisconsin revealed that few students find these online career planning programs at school helpful.
Students said they found career planning activities “redundant” and described them as “the same thing we did in middle school.”
One 17-year-old student in Wisconsin said the career survey was a “waste of time. The test told me I should be a truck driver.” This student took the survey when she had already been accepted into nursing school.
Students consistently said they learned more from conversations with teachers, counselors, family members and professionals than from online questionnaires.
When dreams don’t match reality
Many young people now learn about careers through TikTok videos, YouTube channels, social media personalities and online communities. These influences can play a larger role in shaping career aspirations than formal school career-planning activities.
While many people aspire to make money online as influencers or content creators, nearly half of all online content creators earn less than US$15,000 a year.
I think that educators and families should recognize that young people are thinking about their possible careers – they are just more likely to rely on social media, rather than online surveys at school, to imagine their futures.
