New study investigates: How many adults pursue their childhood dream job?
Kids are pretty fearless when it comes to dreaming big about their futures. Ask a five year old about his or her career aspirations and chances are you'll be taken aback by the ambitious responses: astronaut, pro football star, bajillionaire, president.
Some kids want to be all these things at once.
Ask adults, however, if their childhood dreams ever came to fruition and you're likely to get a more wistful response.
Not too many of us actually end up following through with the pie-in-the-sky dreams we envisioned as kids. (Yours truly wanted to be a paleontologist.)
A recent study conducted by Trade Schools, Colleges and Universities, an online career training resource, attaches some numbers to this phenomenon.
The study surveyed around 2,000 adults about how their current roles in the workplace compare when stacked up against childhood goals.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that close to 80 percent — 78.06 percent, to be exact — of adults don't end up following through on the career path of their six-year-old imaginations.
The approximately 22 percent of people who do pursue jobs their younger selves dreamed up, however, are overwhelmingly happy with their careers: Nearly 90 percent of respondents who fall into this category report high levels of job satisfaction. For this cohort, the industries with the highest levels of satisfaction include: education, information technology, health care, professional services and government.
The study also illuminated a few of the most common career paths that today's starry-eyed kids aspire to: Becoming a doctor is a common dream career for kids of all ages, while pursuit of more ambitious jobs — like becoming an astronaut or a ballerina — tends to be a goal for kids under the age of seven.
The good news? Maybe you'll never go down in NFL history, but that doesn't mean you'll be miserable in whatever field you do end up. A solid percentage (70 percent) of respondents who didn't end up living their childhood dreams still report high levels of job satisfaction.
View the full survey results here.
Stephanie joined the Mashable team from a background in social media marketing. An English Lit major from the University of Miami (where there are no polar vortices), Stephanie is a former content strategist on the Branded Content team, and on the editorial side manages the Job Search Series and part of Mashable Careers.Stephanie was also part of the inaugural class of Remote Year, a program uniting global remote professionals in a yearlong lifestyle experiment to experience the digital nomad lifestyle. During the course of the program, she traveled to more than 12 countries around the world over the course of 12 months while working remotely.She writes about travel, careers, social media and marketing, business and the digital nomad lifestyle.
