The Kind Teacher at a Recent Parents' Evening

Kia ora,

I hope this finds you well. When I ask people to sign up to this newsletter, I always promise I won’t spam them with updates. My silence over recent months suggests I’ve kept that promise rather more thoroughly than I intended.

It’s good to be back at the keyboard. Here’s what’s been on my mind.

At my daughter’s parents’ evening last term, her teacher said something that’s been bothering me ever since.

My wife and I were sitting in our parent-teacher meeting when, almost in passing, the teacher mentioned a chat they’d had with the class. They’d asked each student what they thought they might want to do later in life and offered their thoughts on each idea. One student had said pharmacy. The teacher had told them that was a safe bet. A couple of the other suggestions got a more measured response. They had reservations, they explained, and had encouraged those students to think carefully. They also added that they were glad they didn’t have to enter the workforce these days. “It’s a minefield.”

A throwaway moment in a busy classroom. And yet in the space of a few minutes, a roomful of thirteen and fourteen year olds had been quietly told which of their ideas had promise and which they should probably begin to let go of.

That kind of conversation is happening in classrooms and at kitchen tables across the country every week. And I think it’s a real problem!

The pattern

I’ve been hearing variations of it for a while now. In staff rooms, on the sidelines at netball, on the radio, and in the comments on LinkedIn posts:

“Accountants will be replaced.”

“Trades are safe.”

“Don’t bother with journalism, it’s dead.”

“I really feel for you guys. It’s not going to be easy entering the workforce in the future.”

Each said by a caring adult to a young person they want to help. Each closes down possibility. And when you go back to the research, none of these statements is what most credible experts are actually saying.

The biggest problem in careers conversations right now isn’t AI, or the job market, or the economy. It is the well-intentioned certainty of the significant adults around our rangatahi. Parents. Uncles. Family friends. And, noticeably for those of us working in this space, well-meaning classroom teachers.

What this is doing to our students

Remember the world our young people are already living in. Ask any teenager about the future and you get a fairly consistent picture: climate is collapsing, AI is taking every job worth having, housing will never be affordable. It’s the steady drip of social media as well as what they overhear from folks like us. Don’t take my word for it. Try asking the students in front of you this week.

Onto that doom land the casual comments of the adults they know and trust. These carry more weight than any number of TikToks. They notice when an aunty pulls a face at their idea, when a teacher says “safe bet” about one career and “think carefully” about another, or when a parent sighs about how hard it is out there. Each comment quietly closes a door on one of the available futures.

The cumulative effect is that our rangatahi are approaching their futures as a prediction problem. Not “what would I love to do” but “which idea is the right horse to back”. They are anxious not just about choosing a path, but about choosing the wrong one. As the significant adults in their lives, we need to take the weight of our own voice seriously.

The trouble with confident predictions

Let me be fair to the well-meaning adult for a moment. Of course there are some predictions you can make. Now is probably not the best time to be training as a typewriter repair technician. But beyond a very small range of cases like that, it gets genuinely difficult to say what will and won’t be a fruitful career.

Actually, I’m second-guessing the typewriter example even as I write it. Maybe typewriter repair is becoming a niche artisan trade. See what just happened? A little uncertainty, and I’ve crafted an alternative possible future that wasn’t there a minute ago.

Anyway, back to predictions. Take the recent RNZ piece on entry-level jobs in New Zealand. Most readers will only see the headline: As entry-level jobs dry up in NZ, how can we help young people find their way into work? That alone tells a story. AI isn’t named as the cause. But these days, it doesn’t need to be. The robot apocalypse is upon us.

These are the kinds of stories we share with kids, and the kinds of headlines that fill their social media feeds. Most never get past the headline.

Click through, though, and you find Professor Rod McNaughton being noticeably careful. Yes, AI is having real impact, he writes. But it is “not the only force at play”. He names graduate oversupply, broader economic conditions, and the fact that AI is “automating many of the traditional tasks” within jobs rather than eliminating whole occupations.

None of this is reassuring. But it isn’t apocalyptic either. The apocalypse happens somewhere in the gap between what McNaughton wrote and the version we tell each other over coffee.

Somewhere in that gap, all of those careful bits are gone. The confident statements we make about the future have travelled through several mouths, with each retelling a little simpler and neater than the last. Misguided assumptions become entrenched, and what feels possible narrows. Our futures shrink.

What works better

Telling a young person honestly that we don’t know how the future will unfold comes with its own cost. Researchers at UCL have shown that uncertainty can be more stressful than certain bad news. The honest “we don’t know” is something the young person has to carry too, and we can’t leave them carrying it alone.

This is where stories come in.

The most useful thing we can offer young people, after honesty about how little anyone really knows, is real stories about how careers actually unfold. The unexpected mentor. The job that didn’t exist when they finished school. The side project that became the main thing. The good ones almost always emerge from places nobody was predicting.

For a teenager looking for guidance, this is far better than a fragile prediction dressed up as certainty. The real skill we should be helping young people develop is the ability to keep moving inside uncertainty rather than freezing in front of it.

Interestingly, with all this talk of AI, Jack Clark, one of the co-founders of Anthropic, one of the world’s biggest AI companies and the makers of Claude, is a useful case in point. He couldn’t have predicted his career while at school. An interest in fiction took him into a literature degree. The degree turned into a job in journalism, which turned into a role covering technology and AI, which turned into a role inside an AI company, which turned into Anthropic. Each step was the next right one from where he was standing. None of it would have been visible as a possibility from where he was at fifteen.

I find it genuinely exciting that we have no idea what’s going to be possible for the students we’re talking to today. That’s a better place to start a conversation with them. A conversation that opens up possibilities rather than closes them down.

If this is showing up in your school

While I continue to provide talks and workshops to help students face the future of work with more agency, more than half the schools I work with now ask me to also provide a session for staff, parents and whānau. This is a great wrap around to ensure that the people whose voices on careers carry the most weight in young people’s lives are equipped to best support our rangatahi.

If you’re noticing this pattern in your school or community, get in touch and we can talk through some possibilities for your setting.

P.S. If this piece resonated, forward it to anyone who needs to read it.

Infinite Careers PO Box 78, Auckland, New Zealand www.infinite.careers