The list is short and predictable. Doctor, teacher, footballer, vet, and whatever a parent does. It is not a list of the jobs that exist. It is a list of the jobs a child has been able to see.
Elizabeth Tweedale, founder of the online coding school Coco Coders, watched her daughter Ocean commit to veterinary medicine at five and abandon it shortly afterwards.
“She realized you actually have to deal with really sick pets,” Tweedale said. “The dream dissolved because the reality was sad, not just cuddly.”
That correction was healthy. Most never happen, because nothing arrives to test the picture.
The scale of the information gap is documented. Education and Employers surveyed more than 20,000 primary school children in 2018 for its study Drawing the Future, and found that under one percent had learned about their chosen job from someone visiting their school. Almost everything children believe about work comes from television, social media, or a relative.
The OECD reported in 2020 that career aspirations at age seven, already shaped by gender stereotypes and social background, change little by seventeen. The shortlist forms early and then holds.
Tweedale founded Coco Coders in 2016 to widen it, teaching school-age children through projects anchored on real technology rather than through job titles. A child who likes animals is shown that a shelter network runs on software somebody wrote. A child interested in cities is shown that traffic flow is an engineering problem with people employed to solve it.
Neither of those is a coding lesson in disguise. Both are attempts to make the working world legible to someone who has only ever seen its front counter.
More information is at cococoders.com.
About Coco Coders
Coco Coders is an online coding school founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Tweedale. It teaches Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to school-age children through live interactive classes in group and private formats, and works with students in the United States, the United Kingdom and internationally. Course information is published at cococoders.com.