Last week I was invited to speak at the Nottingham Business School as part of their Future of Work conference.

I talked about career as our pathway into the future and argued that we need to think about the future critically and positively as we plot our own careers into it. This is what I had to say…

As part of this presentation I had the opportunity to run a few polling questions with current undergraduates. Even better, I also have last years data to compare it with from when I gave a version of the presentation last year.

So, I started by asking them whether they believed that their lives would be better than their parents.

While the group was fairly positive, they were slightly less positive than last year, perhaps reflecting the way that the political economy is moving at the moment.

Next I asked them about what they were worried about.

Most focused on individual issues relating to their own career, but there was also considerable concern about what kind of world they were living in with concerns about inequality, AI and world war being raised. Last year war dominated these contextual concerns and relatively few people raised inequality. I continue to be surprised about how unconcerned people seem about climate change, which seems to me to be the biggest and most certain threat.

Next I asked them about how important they felt it was to have decided on a career by the time they left university.

This was a kind of trick question, as my message was really about being prepared for change and dynamism within your career, but it is clear that there is still a real desire amongst students to be ‘sorted’ in their career by the time that they leave university. Good luck to them. If anything this desire for certainty has grown since last year.

Finally I asked them what they felt at the end of the presentation.

In general people felt that ‘life is what you make it’ which was the theme of my remarks. But, there was also a big, fatalistic, group who felt that ‘what happens, happens!’ viewing their career as a path on which they couldn’t exert all that much influence. The proportions were fairly similar to last year, although the ‘we’re all doomed’ contingent had grown somewhat.

Given this I think that there are reasons to be optimistic about young people’s career. People are continuing to dream big dreams for the future and believe that they can make their lives and the world into something better. I hope that they are right.