What Do Kids Want to Be When They Grow Up? — and How to Prepare Them

If you ask an elementary student, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” they might tell you they want to be a dragon. A few years later, that same child might imagine running a reptile-themed YouTube channel. By the time they reach high school, they’re ready to enroll in courses that prepare them for careers in wildlife studies or conservation.

Once students start imagining how an early interest could become a career, they need structured experiences that help them grow that curiosity and practice future-ready skills at the same time. The challenge, of course, is giving students those experiences in a way that fits within real instructional time.

That’s where resources like Everfi’s free college & career suite come in. These engaging, interactive lessons fit seamlessly into the classroom and make it easier for teachers to support workforce readiness while meeting their state standards. In fact, last year alone, more than 420,000 learners used these digital lessons to build key workforce-readiness skills, with students in programs such as Keys To Your Future and Endeavor: STEM Career Exploration seeing average learning gains of 29%.

Let’s explore what kids want to be when they grow up—and how educators can help guide those aspirations into real opportunities.

Main Takeaways

• Children’s early aspirations offer insight into what captures their attention and reflect genuine interests that can be developed over time with the right kinds of support.
• Students expand their sense of what’s possible when they see a wider range of careers and the people who do them.
• Integrating career exploration into everyday instruction strengthens the skills students already practice in class.
• Everfi’s digital lessons help schools offer students equitable career learning, so they can explore interests and potential future pathways without adding to teachers’ prep load.

Table of Contents

1. Why Do Kids Say They Want to Be Certain Things When They Grow Up?
2. What Are the Most Common Jobs Kids Want to Have?
3. At What Age Do Kids Start Thinking About Careers?
4. How Can Teachers Help Students Explore Career Interests?
5. What Skills Do Kids Need for the Future Workforce?
6. How Can Teachers Talk About “Realistic” Career Goals Without Discouraging Students?
7. What Role Do Schools Play in Workforce Readiness?
8. Where Can Teachers Find Free Career Readiness Resources?

Why Do Kids Say They Want to Be Certain Things When They Grow Up?

Why do so many students dream of becoming astronauts, veterinarians, or YouTube stars? The answer lies in how children’s career aspirations develop alongside their growth.

Researchers have spent decades studying how children form career aspirations, and the three prevailing theories find that it occurs alongside their cognitive and social development.

Play & Imagination (Piaget)

According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, young children make sense of the world through play, so it’s no surprise their early “career plans” focus on whatever feels exciting or heroic. When a student says they want to be a dragon trainer, they’re responding to the parts of the idea that feel exciting to them, not to any understanding of the work behind it.

Narrowing Choices (Gottfredson)

As children mature, Gottfredson’s theory of circumscription explains how they begin narrowing the careers they see as possible or appropriate for themselves. During this stage, they start absorbing social messages — about gender, prestige, and “who does what” — from their families and communities and use those cues to categorize occupations. When they see a more diverse range of people doing different kinds of work, they are more likely to incorporate those roles into their mental map of career possibilities.

Learning from Others (Social Cognitive Career Theory)

Social cognitive career theory explains that adolescents form career interests by watching the adults and older peers around them and deciding whether a particular job feels like a fit based on three factors:

• Self-efficacy: Whether they believe they could do the work themselves
• Outcome expectations: What they think the results or rewards of that work might be
• Goal-related beliefs: How well the role matches the strengths and values they’re starting to recognize in themselves.

When these ideas come together in high school, students begin taking specific careers more seriously and look more closely at what the work actually involves.

Bearing this in mind, teachers can look to Everfi’s career development toolkit for developmentally appropriate resources that help students explore careers in ways that make sense for their stage of growth. It includes:

• Over 100 hours of digital & offline lessons for students in grades 4-12
• Planning calendars
• Discussion guides
• Guest speaker opportunities
• Virtual PDs
• College scholarship opportunities & more!

What Are the Most Common Jobs Kids Want to Have?

When looking at the career aspirations of children, several factors impact their answers:

Age

When YouGov asked teens ages 13–17 about their dream jobs, the most common answer — at roughly 9% — was YouTuber or streamer. Healthcare roles came next at around 8%, followed by professional athletics at close to 7%, and then smaller clusters in creative fields like music or acting.

Polls that include younger children tell a different story. Among students ages 6–17, doctor, teacher, and athlete take the top spots by a wide margin.

Put together, these results suggest that elementary and early-middle school students gravitate toward the entertainment jobs they see most often in videos and games. As students get older, their aspirations become more realistic and begin to tie directly to subjects they enjoy or skills they can picture themselves using.

Gender

Surveys such as Drawing the Future and several state reports note that girls are more likely to mention jobs in traditionally caregiving fields, such as education and healthcare. Boys, on the other hand, tend to gravitate toward sports, technology, or public safety.

Researchers point out that exposure, not preference, is the primary driver here. When classrooms bring in diverse role models or give students a window into careers they haven’t seen before, the split starts to narrow.

Geography

In smaller communities with only a few major employers, students typically see adults working in the same handful of industries or trades, such as healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, and local services. Even when they’re curious about other fields, the limits of the local economy don’t provide the resources to learn what those jobs involve.

As for urban communities, there is still much disparity, even within the same bus route. One student might walk past healthcare centers or tech offices every day, while another might only see service jobs in the stores and restaurants near home.

Because children often build their earliest assumptions about work from what’s around them, these geographic differences can influence which careers they imagine pursuing.

At What Age Do Kids Start Thinking About Careers?

Children start forming ideas about work long before they can define the word “career.” Even preschoolers can name jobs they recognize, and by the early elementary grades, they’re already sorting those roles into categories based on their lived experiences.

For example, when a child has only seen men flying planes or mostly sees women teaching, those patterns fold into their existing schema about who does what.

Young learners use these observations to make sense of the adult world, which means their early ideas about work can become limiting simply because their exposure is narrow.

Along with providing students with diverse examples of the labor market, teachers should also champion entrepreneurship as a legitimate career path.

Many children imagine work as a fixed set of jobs held by adults they know, so the idea that someone can create their own role broadens their view of opportunity. Entrepreneurship shows students that careers can grow out of interests, skills, or problems they want to solve, a perspective that makes the world of work feel much larger and more flexible.

Everfi’s free Venture: Entrepreneurial Expedition course consists of four short digital lessons, during which students try their hand at everything from setting goals and building a balanced budget to designing a business idea and seeing how it performs in a simulation.

After completing Venture, 19% more students said they felt prepared to spot business opportunities, and 31% more felt confident evaluating risk.

And, because the course aligns with math, CTE, and personal finance standards and runs entirely online at no cost, it offers teachers an intellectually rich way to let students “try on” entrepreneurship without needing extra materials or class time to build it from scratch.

Create your classes now to get your students learning in under 5 minutes.

How Can Teachers Help Students Explore Career Interests?

Students don’t develop career awareness from a single “career day.” They cultivate it through consistent classroom experiences that help them connect their natural abilities to the future-ready skills different careers rely on.

Every teacher can integrate career awareness activities into their classroom, even while fulfilling the subject-matter standards, through creative classroom activities.

1. Host a Monthly Expert Chat

Inviting a guest speaker once a month — either a local person or a professional willing to hop on a short Zoom call — gives students a clearer picture of how classroom skills work in real jobs.

A math teacher might invite an accountant who can show where algebra actually appears in their work, such as setting up formulas in spreadsheets or using percentages to calculate tax withholdings. Hearing someone talk through those tasks helps students see how the content they’re learning now can become a marketable skill later.

As a follow-up, teachers can assign Everfi’s Accounting Careers: Limitless Opportunities, which introduces students to finance-related careers and lets them practice the kinds of decisions those jobs require.

After completing Accounting Careers, 21% more students reported interest in accounting careers — many of whom may not have realized how far their algebraic abilities could take them.

2. Build a Skill Tree

Building a skill tree is an easy way to help students look beyond job titles and focus on how they can adapt their strengths to work in a variety of industries.

The activity starts with students naming a few core skills from your subject that they enjoy and are confident in, such as analyzing a text, troubleshooting a multi-step math problem, organizing historical evidence, or designing visual data. From there, they expand outward, adding branches for careers that rely on those same abilities.

In an English class, for example, a student who enjoys close reading and argument writing can trace those strengths outward toward fields like journalism, policy analysis, communications, or law. It’s helpful to provide a resource like the National Career Clusters® Framework, an interactive tool that organizes occupations by 30 workforce-readiness skills.

3. Use Everfi’s Digital Lessons to Give Students Hands-On Career Exposure

Endeavor: STEM Career Exploration provides students with an online platform to tinker with problems that feel closer to real-world work than typical class assignments. In one lesson, they’ll design a sneaker, another has them test how a recommendation engine sorts information, and another asks them to think through a logistics puzzle. As they move through these tasks, students get a sense of what STEM roles actually ask of people day to day.

Students who completed Endeavor showed a 29% learning gain, and 52% said they became more interested in a STEM career. It’s often the first time they can picture how their interest in fields like fashion or gaming could be a catalyst for a fulfilling occupation.

What Skills Do Kids Need for the Future Workforce?

Employers are reporting that the skills they consistently struggle to hire for have nothing to do with technology. Instead, they’re looking for people who are competent in durable skills, such as collaboration and self-management, because these skills transfer across industries and remain relevant as tech evolves.

Classrooms already give students daily practice in communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and self-management, so teachers have an invaluable opportunity to provide students with an early start on the skills employers say they need most.

Here are a few ways you can equip students with in-demand workforce readiness skills.

Communication:

• After a discussion, have students revise an explanation in response to a peer’s question.
• Encourage active listening by asking students to restate a classmate’s idea before adding their own.

Collaboration:

• Instead of dividing the task into isolated parts, ask each student to create one component and then merge them into a unified version.
• During group work, ask students to explain why they chose their approach before the group decides on a direction.

Adaptability:

• Use incomplete scenarios that force students to practice adaptive problem-solving. Leave out a key piece of information in a research prompt or data set, and have students identify what’s missing, request it, and rethink how to move forward once they have it.

Digital literacy:

• Give students a statistic or viral claim and have them verify it by tracing it back to its source using reverse-image searches or locating the earliest credible publication.
• Ask students to examine how the same topic is presented in two different digital formats — say, a news article next to a TikTok explainer, or a government page alongside a commercial site — and discuss the differences.

Financial literacy:

• Present students with two realistic choices — like competing phone plans or two part-time job offers — and ask them to calculate which one creates more long-term value.
• Integrate a simulation from Everfi’s Financial Literacy Toolkit into a math or advisory block.
• 20% more students reported being more prepared to figure out their take-home pay from a paycheck after completing EVERFI: Financial Literacy.

Resilience:

• Before a demanding task, introduce a quick strategy from Everfi’s Mental Wellness Toolkit — such as identifying an unhelpful thought and reframing it — and have students apply it to the work ahead. It shows how emotional regulation supports academic performance.
• Add a simple troubleshooting log to long-term projects, where students note the problem they encountered, what they tried, and what eventually worked to help normalize setbacks and reinforce persistence.

How Can Teachers Talk About “Realistic” Career Goals Without Discouraging Students?

Earlier, we noted how many students name careers like streaming or professional sports because those roles are the most visible. In truth, only a small fraction of people reach those positions — fewer than 2% of NCAA athletes turn pro — but the surrounding fields are enormous. Helping students see all the possibilities available to them keeps their enthusiasm intact while offering more realistic options to explore.

Start by probing a little into what part of the job excites them. Students often latch onto a role because of a particular feature — working with animals, performing, building things, helping others, or solving problems. Once you know what’s driving the dream, you have a strong foundation for a deeper conversation about careers. Pairing that discussion with Keys To Your Future: College & Career Readiness gives students a structured way to name those same skills, interests, and abilities and begin connecting them to academic and career choices.

When a student tells you what they like about a dream job, you can open up the conversation by showing them the career cluster it belongs to. Everfi’s college & career suite makes this process easier by giving educators a way to personalize exploration with short, self-paced modules across a range of industries:

• Hockey & auto racing
• Accounting & data science
• Manufacturing & transportation
• Video game development
• Entrepreneurship

What Role Do Schools Play in Workforce Readiness?

As districts shift toward broader college-and-career-readiness models, schools are no longer preparing students solely for four-year programs. They’re being asked to integrate career exploration into everyday instruction and help students understand the full range of postsecondary paths, including trade programs, certificates, apprenticeships, and direct entry into the workforce.

Students come in with varying levels of career awareness, and part of the goal should be leveling the playing field. Many schools lean on the people and organizations around them to give learners tangible examples of adults doing the kinds of work they’re curious about. Depending on where your school is located, that might include:

• People in the skilled trades
• Healthcare workers
• Staff from public agencies like parks, transit, or public safety — who can explain what their day-to-day looks like
• Designers, artists, or technicians working in nearby studios or shops
• A small-business owner

When those connections are limited, Everfi’s no-cost career lessons help fill the gap by providing students with practical simulations in STEM, entrepreneurship, financial decision-making, and workplace skills, without increasing teachers’ workload.

Where Can Teachers Find Free Career Readiness Resources?

When considering what do kids want to be when they grow up, career exploration doesn’t have to mean new textbooks or a separate elective. The most valuable resources are those that fit into what you already teach and give students a clearer picture of life after graduation.

Start with Everfi’s free, standards-aligned, and self-paced career resources that students can complete during advisory, CTE rotations, or embedded in English, science, or math units.

Other options to consider include:

• State Department of Education Career Resources: State-published regional labor-market snapshots and short activities that help teachers tie academic skills to in-demand pathways in their area.
• National Career Clusters® Framework: A visual guide that groups careers by shared skills and training, making it easier for students to see multiple paths tied to their interests.
• NAPE (National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity): Tools designed to help schools address equity gaps in career exposure, including lesson ideas and discussion protocols that help students see themselves in nontraditional fields.
• National College Attainment Network: Free college-going toolkits, affordability worksheets, FAFSA resources, and planning guides to support students in postsecondary decision-making.
• Employment and Training Administration Youth Programs and Services: Resources on youth apprenticeships and federally supported workforce programs for entry-level opportunities in high-demand fields.

A child’s first ideas about work rarely match the jobs they’ll consider later on, but they still matter. Those first questions and comments show what captures their attention and offer an early sense of how they’re beginning to understand the adult world.

Because students spend so much of their day in school, teachers are often the adults best positioned to give them enough exposure to imagine multiple paths that feel attainable and exciting. So, when teachers meet that curiosity with gentle, thoughtful guidance, students begin to see what they’re capable of and how many directions their interests can take them.

Everfi’s free career readiness resources make that work easier by offering classroom-ready lessons that bring real-world tasks into everyday instruction. Teachers can explore all available courses and create a free account to support their students as they begin charting their futures.