Aimless or Flexible? the Consequences of Uncertainty in Youth Career Plans

The aspirations of young people have been extensively studied, and were key variables in early status attainment research in the late 1960s. The link between youth ambitions and eventual educational and occupational outcomes has never been doubted, although the ways in which the variables are related has been debated. Throughout this 50-plus years of research, it has always been thought that all young people had ambitions, but that how much, and for what attainments, needed to be explained. Only recently have researchers begun to pay more attention to the significance of youth’s uncertainty about what they want to do later in life. Some researchers have referred to this as aimlessness or role exploration. Yet this uncertainty can be also viewed as flexibility which is typical or even beneficial in a world in which life-long careers are a thing of the past. In this study we investigate the consequences of uncertainty shown in youth educational and occupational ambitions.  We conduct our study from a longitudinal perspective, and use the 2003 Cohort data of the national Longitudinal Study of Australian Youth (LSAY) which involved over 10,000 students. Following this cohort of youth between ages 15 and 24 we will examine the consequences of uncertainty in educational and occupational ambitions  focusing specifically on differences between those with and without aspirations  and the possible various reasons behind them. We also discuss the implications of our findings for theories of youth social/psychological development, career development, and occupational attainment.