The dentist who'd never looked in a mouth

Kia ora koutou,

I recently met a careers advisor who told me about a student who was dead-set on dentistry. The advisor asked: had he ever looked inside someone’s mouth?

He had not.

Here was a young person ready to train for years for a job that means looking into mouths for hours every day, and he had never taken a peek inside one.

We need to fix this. Before we plan, we must teach kids to imagine.

Plan B should not be a deferred plan A

Students who have thought about a plan typically have a plan A and a plan B. In my conversations with young people, I often find that plan B is usually plan A with a delay or a different route: “If I don’t get an apprenticeship this year, I’ll work at Bunnings and apply again next year.”

That is sensible, but it is not a second option. It’s a different path to the same destination.

Could do’s before might do’s

In Infinite Careers workshops we use our EPIC framework for planning in uncertainty: Explore options, Play out possibilities, Interrogate assumptions and Commit to action.

When we say explore options, we mean EXPLORE. We mean doing what innovative people and organisations do when they face a big decision: think broadly about what is possible, and open our minds to things we would not usually consider. We want the biggest possible range of could do’s before we start narrowing to might do’s.

Here are some prompts I think every student could try:

• a career where more than half my time is outdoors
• a career where I meet more than 30 new people each week
• a career that involves making something
• a career working with young people
• a career in art, entertainment or something similar
• a career where I work in more than three countries each year
• a career that focusses on caring for people or animals

The prompts are not about planning. They are about exploring. While a student does not have to plan a career that keeps them outdoors, they should definitely have had the chance to imagine what it could be like.

There’s a bonus to exploring this widely: we learn about ourselves. Discovering what we dislike, and knowing why, helps us figure out more about our preferences. And now and then we surprise ourselves. The option we’d never have picked can turn out to sound quite cool.

Play out the life, not just the job

Playing out possibilities means thinking about the life a career provides, not only the career itself: the hours, the type of work, where it might lead, the lifestyle, the stress, the travel and, of course, the pay.

It also means looking past the glossy brochure images and the popular tropes. Doctors are rich and have status. Lawyers say “objection!” in court. Vets play with puppies all day. Our would-be dentist liked the pay and the status but had little idea about much beyond this.

Few ideas despite infinite possibilities

Students lean on the jobs they already know, and New Zealand research suggests this starts early. In Drawing the Future, a 2019 survey run by the Tertiary Education Commission, around 7,700 children aged 7 to 13 drew the job they wanted. More than half the drawings were of just nine jobs. One in three children had heard about their dream job through a family member.

The pattern holds into the teenage years. The OECD’s Dream Jobs? report, drawn from PISA data on 15-year-olds in 41 countries, found that 47% of boys and 53% of girls expected to work in one of just ten jobs. I found it shocking that since 2000, the range of careers that students expected to realise became less diverse rather than more.

I suspect this is more about a lack of exposure than a lack of ambition. Students choose from the jobs they can see.

A ladder that can broaden the mind

If you’re yet to check out the social media sensation Career Ladder, you should.

Its creator, Max Klymenko, stands on one side of a stepladder with a guest on the other and tries to guess their job in under two minutes of questions. The Washington Post reports that he has more than 16 million TikTok followers, and that he made the series partly to show people jobs they may not have heard of, and what those jobs are really like.

In March 2026, the UK intelligence agency GCHQ even invited him in to guess real spy jobs. With well-known guests he guesses their first job instead, which shows how winding a career path can be. His own path makes the point: he told the Post it took him around five years to become a lawyer and a matter of hours to realise it was not for him.

Watch a few on TikTok or YouTube.

Imagine first, plan second

Plan A and plan B still matter, but a plan chosen from a short list of familiar jobs has never been tested against anything else.

In our workshops, exploring and playing out come before any planning. Students work through prompts like the ones above, then play out the life behind the ones that spark something. Interrogating assumptions and committing to action come next, and they work far better once students have something real to interrogate. Our Year 11 to 13 sessions take them through all four steps.

Before we plan, we must teach kids to imagine.

Ngā mihi,
Chris