Episode 1: Whose decision is it anyway?

So now we're gonna zoom into the data.

And when we were choosing, "Hey, what do we start for our podcast? What's the insight that we should focus on first? Which ones should we zoom into?" And we went back to of all the professional learning we've done with all different audiences of teachers, career practitioners, adults in general, parents.

The one most photographed slide of any of our presentations comes back to this big stat, which is a piece of data from Monash Uni research, Dr. Jo Gleeson led it, and it says that 55% of school leavers are choosing a pathway to please someone else.

So more than half of our students getting ready to leave school are not choosing a career based on themselves and their own motivations.

So can I ask a question about the data?

Mm.

What were some of the influencing factors?

There, there's a mix, and as we said, as, as your example showed earlier, it is complex, and I think we can't just say...

It's very tempting to go, "It's parents.

You know, it's always parents 'cause they're telling them what to do, and it's high pressure parents." But there's lots of complexity in it, and it's different sets of influences for every person.

So yes, parental influence is, is right up there.

Most of the time parents say, "I just want my child to be happy." But there's caveats underneath that.

You know, what does happy look like? And it will be different for every person.

For some people, it's I haven't really thought about it.

I'm not coming here with an idea.

I'm just gonna take the path of least resistance.

For some people, they might be really set on one path and have massive parental pressure or life needs that mean they can't do that path.

Some people it will be really practical, you know, travel res- restrictions, constraints, or real life challenges.

But at the end of the day, more than half of those people in the study are saying, "This is not my idea." Now, the other thing that I've, I've spent the last couple of weeks really working on with different stakeholders and tertiary pathways across VET and unis is completion rates.

Now, published completion rates are often more than f- around 40, 50% non-completion of courses.

So that decision they've made, they're not sticking with it, it's not panning out.

Um, and that 50% is not, I don't think, a huge coincidence when we see 50% didn't have the motivation to do that path in the first place.

Another big stat that's, that's often picked up is that more than a third of students are saying that school hasn't given them the confidence to make complex decisions about their future.

So at school, most of the time we're teaching for a right answer, not how to handle complexity, ambiguity, how to critically evaluate different possibilities and pathways, and that's exactly what we need, those skills when it comes to steps about their future.

So there's actually, how do I evaluate this in the first place? I don't know how to think about it.