Here’s a thought — follow your child in their chosen field

Ionce met a consultant whose job was to find places for affluent children in the best nurseries and schools. One client on her list had mapped out his son’s life with precision. The boy would attend Cambridge university before embarking on a career in investment banking at Deutsche Bank. The child was a mere six months old.

The father’s ambition seemed absurd. Who looks at their baby’s chubby face and thinks “nascent spreadsheet monkey”? A year on, it seems even more ludicrous. Deutsche, after all, is cutting 9,000 jobs.

Yet, I confess to premature thoughts about my own son’s career. When he started school this term I experienced panic as he set his feet on the institutional conveyor belt. My job is to write about work and careers, and I am assailed by daily predictions of widespread automation and mass unemployment.

I find myself wondering how best to prepare a child for the future. There must be a sunnier path to pursue than stockpiling tinned foods and signing up for survival courses?

Most mothers and fathers start from their own experiences — professions and trades run in families. A 2016 study by Facebook found “people within a family are proportionally more likely to choose the same occupation”. Yet the research also found while “a son who has a father in the military is five times more likely to enter the military, just one in four sons of a military professional does so” — most children strike their own path.

This is good news for my son. I love journalism, but I would not encourage him into an industry convulsed by existential anguish, frequently described as being in terminal decline. Automation is displacing jobs in fields from manufacturing to law firms to banks. My trade could well be next.

I am hardly alone in worrying about my child following in my footsteps. Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, said: “The … most visceral instinct you have as a parent is you want to protect your children and politics is a very rough business, you know.” Accountants, shop assistants and doctors would say the same thing.

Besides encouraging or discouraging them into their own lines of work, how else should parents prepare children for employment? Teachers and businesses urge young people to future-proof themselves by studying science, technology, engineering or maths. Toy manufacturers and entrepreneurs have picked up on the “stem” trend. Christmas stockings will be stuffed with toys marketed on a promise of turning little Poppy or Johnny into the next Mark Zuckerberg.

But I am not convinced everyone can or should be a coder. As Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots, said, routine software development is being automated everywhere.

Perhaps parents should be directed instead. Like Chris Puckett and his parents. In 2016 I met Puckett, who has made much money as an e-sports commentator, hosting competitive video gaming at live events and on screen.

His father is a paper salesman, his mother a receptionist. They worried about him pursuing what seemed to them a flaky career. To allay their fears, Puckett invited his parents to tournaments. Now they are his biggest cheerleaders.

Marc Freedman, founder of a social enterprise that advocates second careers in later working life, reports growing numbers of parents following their children into their chosen careers. I found this cheering.

If, to mangle LP Hartley’s quote, the future is a foreign country — they do things differently there, then maybe future generations are our best guide.

I pledge to support my son in his ambition to be a space policeman. Who knows, perhaps I will follow him? /©