A vocation is a wonderful thing. How lucky are the people who have a strong feeling from an early age that a particular career or occupation is just the right one for them? Untroubled by doubt, they can choose the right subjects at school, focus on their goals so they get into their ideal degree then sail on through to a successful career.
Students shouldn't give up hope if they miss out on their first choice of course.Credit: Anna Warr
Sounds so easy, doesn't it? Winning the lottery is a wonderful thing, too, and about as realistic for most people.
As they enter adult life, young people discover what may not have been apparent as they were progressing in lock-step with their peers through school with all its predictable routines. They learn that real life is messy and unpredictable and there are no perfect decisions. There's no secret to getting everything right. All you can do is try your best to adapt to whatever the circumstances, and make your decisions armed with the best information you can find.
With the release of main round offers from the Universities Admissions Centre, a lucky few among last year's HSC students will have a straightforward decision about what and where to study. Others will agonise over their choices or despair because their first preferences have been ruled out.
None should be discouraged. All should be aware that the ATAR score is not a reliable measure of their intelligence or their potential. It reflects only their performance at a specific point in time at a specific set of tasks bearing little resemblance to the challenges they'll face in the real world. It's a filtering measure used by universities to fill course places. People with the highest ATARs get the greatest choice of courses and institutions. As places fill, those with lower ATARs have fewer choices.
It's an attempt to create an orderly process for the transition between school and university. In reality that transition can be very messy indeed: consider this week's revelation that one-third of Australian university students will not complete their degree within six years. The ATAR system is not very orderly anyway. In fact it's so disorderly that it's being overhauled to be fairer and more transparent.
The take-home for this year's students is not to give up on their hopes if their marks fall just below the cut-off for the course they most wanted. They should read the eligibility fine print carefully and contact the institution to discuss their options, because as a Herald investigation last year revealed, the majority of students are accepted into courses with an ATAR that falls short of the advertised minimum cut-off.
From next year it all changes. Students will have a more realistic idea of their chances because the government will require universities to publish the minimum, median and maximum ATARs of students who have been admitted to a course. This removes the problem of unfairness, where students who take the "rules" at face value do not apply for courses they may have had a good chance of getting in to.
Drop-out rates are a clue that many students make wrong choices for the wrong reasons. Their parents' ambitions for them may get in the way of what they really want to do, or they may be confused about their job prospects. Whether they go to university or TAFE, do an apprenticeship or even get a job straight from school, few people entering the workforce are likely to have the linear careers earlier generations did. Instead, they're likely to have multiple jobs across several careers.
There's an ocean of advice about how to prepare for that. It boils down to getting a set of broad core skills and being ready to adapt and build on them throughout working life. One useful report from the Foundation for Young Australians advises building a portable skill set that can be finessed and carried to different types of jobs within a broadly defined job cluster. Clusters include "carers" (medical, care and support services), "designers" (who construct or or engineer products or buildings), "informers" (providing information, education and business services) and so on.
The world of work is changing so fast that we can't predict what the most in-demand jobs and industries will be in 10 years. But it's clear that working lives will be far more dynamic, complex, flexible and hopefully, interesting than ever before, even – or perhaps especially – for those without a vocation.