While We Wait for Policy
The Case for Early Career Education
In education reform, we spend a lot of time waiting. We wait for the Accord. We wait for the Taxonomy. We wait for the curriculum and training package review.
But while we wait for policy to catch up, our students are moving on without us.
Right now, a 12-year-old in Year 7 is already forming a story about their future. They are deciding, often unconsciously, who they are and where they fit in the world of work. And the data tells us that for too many of them, that story is already shrinking.
The “Career Uncertain” Generation
The latest data from the Career Industry Council of Australia (CICA) is confronting. Their recent media release, Australia’s Youth Deserve Better, highlights that 36% of Australian teens are “career uncertain.” They lack a clear picture of their future work, and even fewer—only 34%—have accessed meaningful work placements.
Worse, their aspirations are often disconnected from reality. The OECD’s Career Readiness project reveals a “dream gap” where student ambitions are highly concentrated in a few well-known professions (medicine, law, veterinary science) that represent a fraction of the actual labour market.
This isn’t a failure of ambition. It is a failure of exposure.
We have built a system where “Career Education” is treated as a bolt-on for Year 10s—a frantic rushed resume workshop before subject selection. By then, it is often too late. The identity is already formed. The limitations are already set.
The “Wait” is Structural
The CICA report criticises the decision to freeze the Work Studies curriculum and reduce career education to an optional “curriculum connection.” They argue, correctly, that this weakens one of the few structured pathways we have.
But here is the critical insight from Marian Wright of Coherence Co-Lab in her blog for BECOME Education: Learners are imagining their future selves from Prep, not Year 10.
BECOME’s research shows that when we engage students early—in primary years and early secondary—aspirations widen. The “blinkers” come off. When students explore career ideas openly and early, their optimism and confidence jump. They stop seeing school as a holding pen and start seeing it as a launchpad.
This aligns perfectly with the OECD’s 11 Indicators of Career Readiness. The OECD found that teenagers who actively explore and experience workplaces have significantly better adult employment outcomes. It’s not magic; it’s agency.
Identity Before Industry
We need to reframe what “Career Education” actually is.
It is not about picking a job title at age 12. It is about identity formation. It is about helping a young person answer three questions:
1. Who am I? (My values, strengths, and interests)
2. What is out there? (The vast, changing ecosystem of work)
3. How do I connect the two?
When we treat career education as a transaction (picking subjects for an ATAR), we rob it of its power. But when we treat it as identity work, it becomes the engine of student engagement.
Don’t Wait for the Mandate
The good news? We don’t need a federal mandate to fix this.
Schools have the power right now to embed career education into the fabric of learning, rather than leaving it in the hands of a single, overworked careers counsellor.
• Start Early: Bring role models into primary classrooms. Let students interview nurses, coders, and tradies—not to recruit them, but to normalise the diversity of work.
• Integrate, Don’t Bolt On: Use the curriculum. For example, Maths is the language of engineering, Humanities is the foundation of social policy. Every subject has a career context; we just need to make it visible. Inquiry and project-based learning can provide real-world contexts and outcomes directly linked to particular industries.
• Prioritise Agency: Use the OECD indicators and the Australian Blueprint for Career Development as checklists. Are your students talking to employers? Are they visiting workplaces? Are they connecting what they learn today to who they want to be tomorrow?
The policy gears grind slowly. The Universities Accord and National Skills Taxonomy will take years to fully trickle down. But our students are writing their future stories today.
We owe it to them to make sure those stories are big enough to hold their potential.
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