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What did you want to be when you grew up?

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I was talking to a work colleague the other day and he told me how pressure his son, currently revising for his GCSE mock exams, is under. Far more than I ever experienced for my O levels at my bog standard 1980s comp.

In addition, he, the son, is constantly being told he has to decide what career path he wants to follow and to target his efforts accordingly. That struck me as bizarre on two grounds – first, we are always being told that young people today will typically ‘build portfolio careers’ (jargon for insecure employment), and second, I’m 58 and have no idea what I ‘want to do’. I’ve quite enjoyed most of what I have done but they have always been jobs I have fallen into rather than worked towards.

What did you want to be when you were a child? I have vague memories of wanting to be a policeman or fireman when I was primary age, something that seemed heroic and came with an impressive uniform. Either that or a dolphin. By secondary school I think I had an aspiration towards architecture, but my technical skills wouldn’t have been up to it. Instead I just drifted into whatever I applied for and would have me. It’s been fine.

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Comments

  1. Play centre-forward for Scotland. After scoring the winner in the World Cup Final against England, I retire to my very large house on Royal Deeside where I write my first novel. My Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech is both humble and magnificent. My wife, Raquel Welch, looks on with pride and I know I’m in for a very special time tonight . The musical I co-write with Bob Dylan……

  2. I still don’t know. I once wanted to be a vet (mainly James Herriot related), but my careers advisor (who reeked of alcohol) said possibly not as I was poor at woodwork! Later as I was good at maths and physics it was determined an engineer I should be. Right decision? Not sure

  4. I wanted to be a pop star, of course. Like Marc Bolan. A dream thwarted only by lack of talent, charisma, luck and drive. I also remember being profoundly jealous of my dog, who got to stay at home all day doing feck all, a path I have been slightly more successful in emulating.

  6. I didn’t know back then and still don’t know at 55. A bit like Gatz, I dropped into a job after school at 16 and kept doing it. It’s never really interested me but it’s allowed me to travel and live in a few different countries. That lack of interest doesn’t bother me too much as I’m able to compartmentalise life pretty well – so as along as I really enjoy my evenings, weekends and holidays I’m not too arsed about fulfilment at work.

    My parents were never too interested in what I was doing and I never got any careers advice from school as far as I remember

  7. I always wanted to be a chronic under-achiever and now that I’ve retired from a lifetime of doing just that I’m pleased to say that my ambition has been fulfilled.

    Of course the smart answer is ‘an adult’, but I’m not sure I’ve achieved that either!

    • The closest thing I had to a hero and role model when I was in my teens was Shelley, as portrayed by Hywel Bennett in the sitcom of that name. I loved the idea of being a smart arse layabout who belittled authority figures with his wit and intelligence. Mission partially achieved, I think.

      • I once sat next to Hywel Bennett in a Cardiff pub. It was the early 80s when Shelley was a big hit on TV. He was with his agent discussing future scripts. We exchanged a few words, and he came across as a really nice bloke. He did enjoy a beer though, although maybe a bit too much, as just a few years later he was treated for alcoholism at the Priory clinic.

    • Slightly longer and more accurate reply…

      My grandfather was a printing press engineer and had a soldering iron in his garden shed. As a child I’d often have my head inside my mum’s 1960s Dansette, or the back off a radio I’d picked up for coppers at a jumble sale. I’d resolder the loose wire and resell at the next jumble sale. The profit would go on records to play on the Dansette. Not much has changed in the 50 years since.

      At secondary school I got the all-time record score of 99.5% in the “options” exam (I spelt potassium wrong). My physics teacher set up a weekly lunchtime electronics club*, only three of us turned up, we made a rubber duck which quacked if the bath water was too hot for baby, it was entered for a national competition (we came second).**

      I only got grade B A-levels in Maths and Physics but it was enough to get me into Reading*** university and I walked into a job the Easter of my final year. I spent most of my career designing audio or video electronics, but the last decade in something which makes no noise, sadly.

      For the last 15 years I’ve helped run a schools outreach thing at the Cambridge university physics department. 11% of the UK economy needs a physics A-level but only 4% of students take it. So there are 3 jobs for every person, so applicants are in demand, which drives up wages. Which has been handy.

      (*) I only discovered decades later, at a school reunion, that the electronics club was set up to encourage me to take physics A-level, and to apply to university, and was wound up after I left. Cheers, Mr Brownlee.

      (**) the following year it was won by… a rubber duck which quacked when the bath water was too hot. Cheating bastards.

      (***) I told you I was dull.

  9. I guess I got lucky…
    OK, some graft was involved too, but it was nonetheless it was guided more by circumstance than any hard-wired sense of vocation.
    My father was a public health doc and, by the time I was choosing O-levels and A-levels, my brother, 10 years older, was already well onto the way to being a psychiatrist. I never felt actively pushed towards medicine, but the prevailing current still had me nonetheless pulled a little that way. At a school my parents couldn’t really afford, their sending me there more for perceived societal expectation, I wasn’t given the opportunity to coast, however much I tried. So, almost before I knew it, I had achieved the requisite grades for medical school.
    Medical school, at least in the 70’s, was a blast, a florid extension of a belated adolescence, with 5 years ahead any actual responsibility. Loved it. But, after a punishing last minute cram for finals, suddenly I was a doctor.
    With still little idea of where I might find a niche, I chose General Practice; it struck me that hospital drs gradually lost F2F contact with their patients as they ascended the hierarchy, that being what I enjoyed most. I found I enjoyed it, even if my parents initially disapproved, being of the generation where GPs were the ones unable to do anything else. I was also quite good at it, that being as far as my still vestigial impostor syndrome allows me to say. I was successful, let’s say, and happy in my work, for the most part.
    I retired from head of my practice at age 60, working then, part time, as a salaried clinician, a further 7 years, ahead hanging up my boots 21/12 ago. Do I miss it? Not a bit. Did I love it? Probably. What else could I have done? Uncertain, as I never really had to think about that.
    Would I push my kids in my direction? Hell, no, and didn’t. My cosy world then, and that sort of opportunity of experience has long since dissipated. I have been delighted that they have spread their wings elsewhere.

  10. I remember the careers advisor at my school ‘helping’ me think through my A- level choices and direction after O- level results came out. I think I got something ridiculous like 9 ‘B’s and 2 ‘A’s, the latter in Environmental Science and Physics. He said I could do anything, which was such useless advice, I followed the grades through and did generic subjects at A level (Physics, Maths, English, German). I dropped German after a term, got an ‘E’ in Physics, then had to do retakes to get the grades to get to university a couple of years later.

    Some people have a clear pathway through to their chosen career, others fall off along the way. Somehow or other I ended up working in an area that my dynamic and activist Quaker background spurred an interest in (international politics), rather then one where I might have been happier, but less well off (gardening), but that seems to have emerged as much from luck as by conscious effort and planning.

  12. I wanted to be the man that paints the white lines around dead bodies at murder scenes. Either that or record the voices for lifts….”car park, level 4”.

    On a more serious note, when I was very young, it was the standard cliche of “train driver”. As I grew older, I got my first ZX81 (would have been 14 years old) and that started my fascination with electronics, which I followed through Uni and then my working life.

    • It’s conspicuous that very few people who actually become train drivers wanted to be one as a child, though a small number who do, also ‘play trains’ on their days off as well, on preserved steam railways and the like. It bemuses me how many people greet me with the assumption that I somehow fulfilled a childhood dream to become a train driver; it’s just a tad belittling.
      Contrary to @Gatz, I always had time for my geography teachers. Geography has always been written through me like a stick of rock and quite early at school I fancied the idea of academia, so I could just bury myself in the subject. Later in life, that had developed into an ambition to be a travel writer. Working in admin in the travel industry was a very poor substitute. This was truly one of the most demoralising periods of my life. What I wanted was to be doing something hands-on, something with a sense of community and camaraderie, and definitely not in an office. Oooh look; there’s an advert for train drivers. That’ll do.
      It has more than ‘done’; it’s defined the happiest years of my life.

  13. A vet. Never really pushed for it though – with my Mother on a widow’s pension it was always assumed that third level education was out of the question and I went along with that. Maybe with a bit of elder advice I could have done it, but as it was I performed pretty well in school but took my foot off the gas in the final two years and got a mediocre Leaving Cert (our version of A-levels) Fell into whatever I could so no profession as such…my daughters are different – they have qualifications and careers.

  14. Aged 8 a Royal Navy frigate captain, aged 18 a theatre director. My career, in the the arts, has been a long process of figuring out what I’m employable as and better than others at, and refining that.

  15. At certain points I wanted to work in advertising (lunches, creativity and riches seemed appealing) and own a record shop. But a vague realisation that I wanted to be a buyer surfaced about 16 or 17 – ideally the cheese and wine buyer for a company that needed a lot of cheese and wine. So, therefore, I joined Sainsbury’s as a trainee manager – which taught me that retail was a pretty hard and unforgiving industry to work in. I escaped, became a trainee buyer for the worlds favourite airline (those BA ads were genuinely fabulous) and had a successful but largely cheese and wine free career being a procurement type.

    • When I was a bookseller I had a manager who had started his career as a supermarket management trainee. He told me of one supermarket manager of his who cut his holiday short because he didn’t think he was being waited on as well as he was by his staff when the hotel refused to wash his car for him.

      • After 2 ½ years in supermarket retail management, I couldn’t believe how cushy office life was. I think I came across as exceedingly hard working when I started – I couldn’t believe sitting down and drinking tea was so available during the working day.

        Supermarket branch managers were, largely, all characters. There were some good ones but not many.

        • After Uni, I had an interview with M&S in Baker St HQ. “In your spare time would you
          1. Go to a museum
          2. Go to a rugby match
          3. Walk round a supermarket and study product placement ?”
          4. None of the above
          I didn’t get the job.

        • Alost anyone who escapes retail, including me, feels a tremendous sense of release on moving to an office. ‘What? My weekends are my own time? All of them? And I get more than one day off for Christmas, as well as sitting down and managing my own time – callooh callay!!’

          If you’ve never worked in retail or hospitality, be nice to those who do, especially as Christmas approaches. It can be ‘challenging’.

        • I worked as a Pharmacy Manager for Safeway in the early 1990s for a couple of years, and bar one, all of the Supermarket Managers I met were ill educated, self righteous bullies. They also resented me as I earned more than them.

  16. At primary school I wanted to be an archaeologist, partly because I was taken to see the Mithras temple in London as my Dad’s firm were involved somehow when it was discovered in 1954. And partly because of the Mortimer Wheeler television appearances in the 50s. Needless to say, nothing became of my interest, although I still enjoy Time Team.

  17. I always followed my Geography teacher’s sage advice, and wanted to remain healthy. I’ve made the 3 score and 10, so no complaints there.

    Job-wise? Never had a clue. My school made a big song and dance about some high-tech computer-based analysis of some silly ‘Career Prospectives’ form we were all ‘invited’ to fill in during our fifth year, well ahead of exam time. We all duly spent half an hour filling it in. No doubt a few rascals deliberately sabotaged the process with daft answers – mostly multiple choice things, which limited wanton idiocy – but most of my friends were keen to see what the ‘results’ said, and took the thing seriously. After all, it was more fun / less hassle than an hour of Latin or German. The forms were collected and sent off somewhere – a University department in Oxford or Cambridge probably – and we waited a couple of weeks before being given the words of wisdom on printed sheets returned from the expert analysts. The outcomes were usually along the lines of ‘Financial Services’, ‘Armed Forces’, ‘Medicine’ and the like. Mine simply said ‘Arts/Sciences’.

    I could have spent that half hour on some irregular verbs.

    Still don’t have a clue, even after 3 years teaching followed by 40 years in IT.

    • I suspect that is the only time in recorded history anyone has ever paid the slightest attention to a geography teacher.

      Ours made occasional appearances in the local press after yet another appearance in the local magistrates’ court for taking ‘glamour’ photos. He was known as Wiggy because it was assumed he wore one, though why anyone wearing a wig would choose a bright red combover is anyone’s guess. He also had a couple of beautiful Saabs. Despite these eccentricities he managed to be an extraordinarily boring man, even by the standards of his profession. I failed O level geography.

  18. I wanted to be a radio journalist. For a very brief period, much later, I was one. Ironically, having been made redundant recently the only things I get paid for now are pub gigs and the self-published diaries and so I am, finally, a professional writer and musician. Dream job.

  19. Up to age 16 I fancied going in the merchant navy because my cool uncle was in it and the uniform looked great. I then failed selection at HMS Conway on Anglesey due to me lamentable maths and vaguely thought I might be a journalist. Redid A levels, visited mates at uni which looked a good doss and in the advice of a careers bloke in the job centre I did Business Studies – “it has lots of interesting subjects and a year in industry so you can earn some money. Then hopefully you’ll know what you want to do”. Best advice I ever had, and did it for 43 years.

  20. To the age of about 15, I followed the Paul Weller aspiration “a famous footballer or rock singer or a big film star”.
    And it could’ve happened, apart from a sheer lack of talent in those areas.
    Taking your options in 3rd Year decided your path the O Levels (or in my case CSEs). The offering and grouping of the options was to give a broad path and education if you hadn’t chosen your destiny, and would allow targeting if you had
    (or so I was told anyway).
    I left school at 17 still with no idea what I wanted to do, and applied to the first ad in the paper I saw “Mechanical Engineering Apprenticeship” – I got it, and out of sheer luck and laziness my career path was defined.
    And because I’d chosen to do this route, the application came too and I did quite well out of it.
    At the end of the 4 years I was taken by the bright lights and promise of Project Management, and I’ve been there ever since (and never once needed to use my French CSE Grade 4)

  21. I won a national art competition for children when I was ten. I thought I must be quite good at this old drawing and painting lark so I just kept doing it. I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself doing anything other than what I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get right. One day I may finally make something that I am 99% content with but I doubt it. It would have been nice to have made more money but que sera sera.

    • It’s traditional for the best artists to spend their lifetimes starving in a garret. Comfort yourself with the fact that in a couple of hundred years time the National Gallery will be holding a retrospective exhibition and you will be feted as one of Britain’s unsung greatest.

  22. Following a theme early on in the thread. I’m 58 and still don’t know what I want to do. I joined the public service nearly 40 years ago and have stayed there ever since largely doing the same type of work, only now with computers instead of bits of paper. The job is interesting at times, dull at others, and a lot of in between. It pays the bills, by which I mean, it allows me to buy records and see bands.

  23. At the age of 10 or so, the estate where I lived was plagued with nasty stray dogs that made every walk to school a battle in which I wielded my schoolbag to fend off the vicious curs. As a consequence I told a school inspector that when I grew up, hopefully rabies would have arrived in Ireland and I could shoot stray dogs for a living.

    In my teens I thought I’d like to be a journalist. The gradual realisation that this might involve working late at night, writing about “boring”, everyday news rather than West Ham and my favourite bands, caused that dream to dwindle.

    I eventually became a social worker and, at one stage my job involved writing around three substantial court reports a week to deadlines and based on face to face interviews and information collated from other sources. This was everything I thought journalism might be including the late night report writing apart from the acclaim of the general public. I think social work was a better fit for my particular talents

  24. In high school I was always in the top stream and when I was about 15 or 16 various of my classmates had already decided they were going to med school or whatever, after having serious conversations with their parents. My parents assumed I would go to university, they being the first in their families to have done so. In my first year, and having just turned 17, I took Maths, French and Music. i remember my Dad suggesting that, with some ability in maths, I could work in the Treasury!

    All I actually wanted to do was play in a band. But being a pianist and therefore without an instrument of my own, and not a singer, and extremely reserved and shy, that wasn’t going to happen. It finally did happen when I was 23 and I have made a living out of music ever since, in a variety of ways.

    • Hats off to you @mousey for having the courage to follow your dreams. I was at school with various mates in bands and a few did ok. I didn’t have the nerve to go for it alas and ended up following my mum’s recommendation for my first job after sixth form!

      • Thanks @Freddy-Steady. Definitely following my dreams, very much against the wishes of my parents. My Mum, when I asked if they’d lend me money to buy a piano – “why don’t you just GET A JOB”. My Dad – “you’ve got a brain why don’t you use it”.

        Years later of course, when I’d composed a few successful film scores and provided them with 3 grandchildren, all was (kind of) forgiven.

        Also, being a musician, or any other creative artist, is not a matter of deciding to do it. There’s no choice.

        And finally, this was the early 70s, and the “turn on tune in drop out” ethos was in force.

        • When I got kicked out of university at the end of the first year, my dad said, that’s it then, you’ll have to go into the civil service. As if the civil service was somewhere the failures went. Fortunately I had other ideas – I like to read, I thought, why don’t I go into publishing. The rest is history, sort of…

          Of course 45 years’ worth of civil service pension wouldn’t go amiss now.

  25. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school, but my mother was desperate for me to get a ‘trade’, as that was the only way working class boys who went to a crap comprehensive could make anything of themselves in life.

    Like other people on here I left school at 16. My parents were really good to their four sons, but as far as education was concerned they had no interest. You were just expected to leave school at 16 and get a job, so you could contribute to the family finances.

    I got an apprenticeship as a welder/fabricator, and did this for 18 years. I was then made redundant at 34 and fancied a change, so I became a postman, retiring last year after 29 years service. So I’ve had two jobs since I left school in 1977 with very few qualifications, and enjoyed them both immensely, although I wish I could have had a better education, and done something a bit more interesting.

    My youngest brother fulfilled his dream though. He was football mad as a child and the only job he ever had was as a professional footballer.

  26. I thought I wanted to do something with my hands so took a mechanical engineering apprenticeship: milling, turning, grinding etc but by the end of the 3rd of 4 years, I knew I didn’t want to do it forever. Production work is dull and exacting plus you need to be quite quick, which I wasn’t. I did a year after the end of the apprenticeship then got out and had a couple of dead end jobs until I fell into what I do now, although the tech was quite primitive in those days. Video was the poor relation to slides, the rostrum cameramen saying that video would never achieve the image quality of 35mm. While the old multi image shows had a certain look and charm, I don’t miss rigging and lining up 18 or 30 slide projectors that all had to be perfectly aligned for the images to work and the control gear was pretty flaky too.
    It’s mostly been good fun and the people and travel have been great but it’s drawing to a close. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
    I was never encouraged to go to university and I have often wondered what I might have studied and how different life would have been. My son wouldn’t have got his very decent job had he not gone and my daughter has had the time of her life, while managing to do the work and has expanded her already considerable artistic talent. I’m a little envious.

  27. Age 8: fighter pilot. The optician, having announced that I was short-sighted, all unknowing uttered the dread words, ‘I’m afraid you’ll never be a fighter pilot.’ Collapse of skinny young party.

    Later I wanted to be either an architect or an archaeologist. No idea why.

    • I too aspired to be a fighter pilot. Flying an English Electric Lightning for the RAF was my dream. My eyesight let me down too.

      Left School at 16 with just three O Levels. Maths (second try, a C grade), French (scraped in with the lowest possible pass grade – I was the only kid in my class to pass it.) and English Language, for which I got an A grade.
      I joined Post Office Telephones as an apprentice telephone engineer. Foolishly left without finishing my apprenticeship and worked for a few years in various local electronics factories.
      Dropped out and moved to West Wales to doss about on the dole and take (mostly soft) drugs. Eventually worked seasonally in the local tourist hotel as a dishwasher/kitchen porter and then as cook and supervisor in the hotel’s attached café. Moved to another bigger hotel, living-in and doing bar work and occasionally waiting tables.
      Fed up of always being skint I went on a government training course (in Norwich, 1984) moved back to my home town after and became an Electrician, the job I continued doing until I retired in 2016.

      • It was Spitfires I had in mind, which tells you where my head was at.

        I had a school friend who joined the RAF and became a Lightning pilot. Until he forgot to lower the undercarriage when landing and had to eject. Big oops.

        He ended up as an airline pilot…😳

        • Another would-be Spitfire pilot at the age of 8, though my being short-sighted and it being 1980 meant that dream was less than realistic.

          At school we had a legendarily bad careers officer who, it was said, would always suggest fish farming if he didn’t know what to do with you. I’d hankered after becoming an architectural modeller after seeing them in museums and such. I was good at art and design. When I asked what qualifications I might need to advance my career he sifted through his folders, went quiet for a while, then said “have you ever considered a career in fish farming?”

          Thanks to a foul-mouthed but inspirational teacher I got a place in art college when everyone had given up on me. I was the only one on my Foundation year who went in a graphic designer and left the same way. A degree course later and my career was set. I briefly flirted with music on the side but noticed that the only friends I knew making any money from it were music teachers.

          I’ve worked for some lovely people and some of the most ignorant, vicious arseholes on earth, most of them in marketing. I find the smarter and capable the person, the nicer they are. Design has become a passion – seeing a badly spaced headline on a poster gives me the vapours and, while AI might see me off before I retire, I’ll be happy doing it as long as I can.

  28. Like Gatz in the OP, I never really had a specific career ambition. I think I’m in the Tony Hancock camp in that if I really applied myself I might have been really good at something – but I couldn’t be bothered.

    I have ended up in group pensions and Life & Health insurance. I genuinely enjoy it. When people have a claim paid to them at the worst time of their lives, it even feels like a good thing.

  31. I remember a teacher asking us to draw a picture of what we wanted to be – I drew myself as an artist, sitting in a field, painting. As I finished quickly, she asked me to do another, so I drew myself as a fireman, not because I wanted to be one, but because I wanted to draw the flames and the water.

  32. Rather oddly, I cannot remember any childhood ambitions as such. That probably says a lot about me – if I had had something to aim for I may have actually achieved rather more than I feel I did..?!

    I do remember my Grammar School being absolutely useless at ‘careers’ advice – they were only interested in pushing the top achievers towards Oxbridge, and were very sniffy about any other further education. I stumbled into Teacher Training and taught Art and Design for a while, eventually having my own screen printing business (including those awful Radio 1 T shirts for Smiley Miley). Eventually I did an OU degree and ended up in computing….go figure!

  33. I seem to recall I wanted to be a (press) journalist, dazzling my readers with brilliant insights and the elegance of my prose. Somehow, it never quite happened.
    I spent a lot of time during my A-level and university years translating other languages into English. And that’s what I ended up doing professionally for most of my life. At about the time I retired, the entire translating profession was, sadly, taken over by a Big Guy who could do it all much cheaper and more quickly: Mr AI. You may have heard of him.

  34. Retired. And I’m not joking, my first day of school was the worst day of my life – forced to abandon my carefree life of following whims – and I understood that going to work would be even worse.
    I’m still waiting impatiently to retire.

    • I’m with you Locust. When I started work after graduating I didn’t dislike it but the thought of doing it to the almost complete exclusion of anything else for the next 40 years I found immensely depressing. I retired 18 months ago and have loved every minute.

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