At the end of the school year last month I had cause to read a junior school class’ leaving book. A quite lavish document, with plenty of colour pictures; the school had made altogether more fuss of the 11-year-olds on their leaving for comprehensives, than in my day.
Of particular interest in the question-and-answer part of the volume that each child answered was what they said (and all of them said something) about what they wanted to do or be when they grew up. As in my time, many of the boys wanted to be professional footballers. One wanted to be a SWAT team member as well (perhaps there will be scope for job-sharing?!). Some of the answers were charmingly precise. Two girls gave the same answer, to have a cafe in Cornwall; one would do the desserts, one the rest of the business. Another girl was going to be an architect in Cornwall, with the disconcertingly precise husband, two children and a dog (although the breed was not specified).
One lad wrote of wanting to be a software engineer or ‘computer fixer’. Otherwise, ‘old’ jobs were the norm; that is, jobs known, because by definition the jobs and entire occupations that those 11-year-olds may well do in their working lives, perhaps quite soon into their adulthood, probably have not been named or even dreamed of yet. Two girls wrote of wanting to be in the police; one a detective, one an officer.
A question; should children be thinking of what they will do as adult workers at all, aged 11, or should they enjoy a carefree childhood as long as they can? Did the school prompt these children into having these thoughts, for the sake of the leavers’ book. And does it matter that private security and other large-employing related services did not feature? The boys clearly did not do the elementary maths – they can see the country supports professional footballers in the hundreds, yet if a fair chunk of the nation’s boys want to be taken on by a professional football club, the odds are against anyone in your class, let alone you, making it. By comparison, given that the total of the SIA-badged in the UK has been rising in recent years and has topped 430,000, at that rate there’s a good chance that one of that class will get an SIA badge – at a guess in the year 2040, because according to the recent monthly licensing statistics from the Security Industry Authority, the mode (most occurring) age of someone with an SIA licence is 27.
At least football is as popular as ever, and no-one is showing interest in making robot footballers to watch instead; someone will still have to be a footballer. Which begs the question of which other jobs will last, and (more’s the point) in numbers. Jobs likely to survive are those requiring a mix of the service, given only by a human with emotions such as offering compassion to a victim of crime; and physical, such as response to a building alarm, and carrying out tasks that only a human can do (so far) even without conscious thought that yet are beyond a machine – climb stairs, shut and lock a door, eject a trouble-maker, tell someone drunk at a pub door why they can’t come in.
Photo by Mark Rowe; summer weekday afternoon, St Martins Lane, central London, a steward keeping the road clear for traffic due to a crowd of mainly young people outside a theatre.
