You’re already a career influencer

Imagine coming home pleased with something you’ve sorted out at work. A delivery had gone astray, a customer was waiting, and you found a way to put things right.

Your teenager hears the story over dinner. They may not share your enthusiasm for the finer points of delivery schedules, but they’ve heard something about what your work involves and why you found it satisfying.

No one calls it career education. It’s just something that happened that day.

But our children get these glimpses of working life from us all the time. They hear what we enjoy, what frustrates us and which kinds of work we think are worth considering.

Long before we ask what they want to do, we’re already helping shape their picture of work. How can we make that influence as helpful as possible?

Your influence is already there

Research published by the National Careers Institute in 2022 identified parents as the biggest influence on young people’s career decisions. It also found that parents underestimated their influence and needed support to find reliable, current information and create opportunities for their children to learn about work.¹

So if you’ve been wondering whether you have anything useful to contribute, it seems you’re already contributing. Even when no one has asked for your advice.

Family experience can be enormously valuable. We can explain work we know, introduce people who do it and help a young person see a pathway that might otherwise have stayed out of sight.

The question is how we use that influence to give them the best chance to discover what could be right for them.

Helping them see beyond what we know

We each know a particular part of the working world. Our own jobs, the work our friends do, perhaps a few industries we’ve encountered along the way. Beyond that, our knowledge can get a little patchy.

Keeping up with every occupation would be a fair-sized project. Most parents already have quite enough to do on a Tuesday.

And even the work we know well comes with our own preferences attached. You might love explaining something until another person understands it. Your teenager might find much more satisfaction in figuring out how to fix a machine. Your enthusiasm is useful information, but it won’t necessarily be theirs.

That’s why helping them explore involves more than passing on what we know. They need opportunities to encounter kinds of work neither of you may have considered, and a way to make sense of what they see.

One of the most useful things we can do with our influence is give a young person the chance to discover interests and possibilities of their own.

Learning something about them too

Of course, we know our children. We’ve seen what holds their attention, what they willingly spend time doing and what they’ll make quite an effort to avoid.

Those observations can offer clues. But they don’t tell us how a young person will respond to work activities they’ve never encountered. Favourite subjects and hobbies are only part of the picture.

Before we can help them find work that interests them, they need a chance to discover what those interests are. That means seeing what people actually do, considering whether it appeals and being allowed to remain unsure while they learn more.

We might find ourselves learning something about our young person too. An area we hadn’t imagined for them may catch their attention. The work we thought would be perfect might leave them distinctly unmoved. We can try not to take that personally.

When they begin recognising what interests them, they have something of their own to follow. Further study, training or work experience can start to connect with a possibility they want to investigate.

How Work Sync can help

This is what I wanted Work Sync to make easier for young people and the adults supporting them.

Our short videos introduce work activities across 24 Work Domains, grouped within eight broader Work Themes. Together, they provide a map of different kinds of work, so young people can explore beyond familiar job titles without having to make sense of thousands of occupations at once.

As they watch, they consider whether the work interests them. They can choose a tick, a cross or a question mark. They don’t need a career plan before they begin, and being unsure is a perfectly useful response.

Their responses come together in a personalised Work Interest Summary, helping them recognise patterns in what appeals and what doesn’t. Wayfinder then connects those interests with occupations they can investigate, including possibilities they may never have heard of.

For parents, that gives us a clearer basis for offering help. We can learn about the areas that have caught their attention and help them look for useful experiences or people who could tell them more. A conversation with a career advisor can build on what they’ve discovered too.

Our own knowledge and connections still have a place. We can use them with a better understanding of what the young person wants to explore. And we can look beyond our usual circle when the possibilities take us somewhere new.

They can return to Work Sync as their thinking develops, revisit their responses and continue exploring. There’s room to learn more and change their mind, as most of us have done a few times ourselves.

Being the best career influencer we can be means taking an interest in what they discover and helping them explore it further. We don’t need every answer ready. We do need to make room for answers that might surprise us.

That’s how Work Sync can help us use the influence we already have: by giving our young people a wider view of work and a way to find possibilities that interest them.

And who knows? The next interesting work story at the dinner table might be theirs.