When you were a kid in elementary school, you were undoubtedly asked at least once, if not in every grade, what you wanted to be when you grew up. As each member of your class named a profession or wrote their little paragraphs answering that question, the responses were pretty standard – lawyer, doctor, maybe engineer or writer or teacher. As you progressed through grades in school, however, the answers became more diversified. Part of this is attributable to the fact that career exploration activities began to occur, students were introduced to a wider variety of professions, and, as well, became aware of the educational requirements for most of those professions. Kids who wanted to be doctors in the 2^nd grade were now looking at other professions, for sure. So, what are the popular professions for high school and college students today? Here’s what the research says.

Popular Professions with High Schoolers

If students in high school choose not to go on to a 4-year college, but pursue vocational technical training of some sort, the following career paths are the most popular right now:

• Medical Assistants/Physicians Assistants/Lab Technicians
• Dental Hygienists
• Medical Records Administration
• Veterinary Assistants
• Para-Legals
• Computer Networking and Administration
• Programming
• Culinary Arts
• Hotel and Restaurant Management

Twenty years ago, several of these career paths were not a part of community college or vocational school programs. Emphasis was placed on skilled trades with career paths in manufacturing industries. Because those jobs have essentially “dried up” as we have moved from a manufacturing to an information and service career environment, so have high schoolers changed their minds about what types of careers they will pursue.

Popular Career Choices for Millennials in 2015

Here is where it gets interesting. High job demands for Millennials will be in STEM areas – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. And yet, there are still only a minority of college students actually selecting careers in these areas, given what we know about their choices of college majors. As little as one year ago, in October, 2014, these were the most popular college majors:

• Business Administration and Management
• General Psychology
• Nursing
• General Biology
• Teacher Education
• Criminal Justice
• Accounting
• General Liberal Arts and Sciences
• English and Literature
• History

Digging a bit deeper, it also appears that many students who have selected these majors understand that they will have to go on to graduate school in these fields if they hope to be employable, and there are popular ultimate careers for these students, as follows:

• Law
• Journalism
• Clinical Psychology
• Business (MBA opens many more doors)
• Politics/Government Career Employment
• Teaching – high school or college level
• CPA (requirements include specific post-graduate work experience plus passing the certification exam)

There is a bit of a disconnect here. Those career fields in which there will be the highest demand are not the most popular among students in college today. This disconnect may indeed may America as a whole less competitive globally in future years. Perhaps it is time that we place more emphasis on STEM at a very early level, so that maybe a 3^rd grader will declare that s/he wants to be an engineer – environmental, biochemical, information systems, etc.