Boys dream of becoming engineers, girls teachers: survey
30% of those surveyed by LinkedIn said they either hold their childhood dream job or work in a career related to it
Mumbai: Boys dream of being engineers when they grow up (18.6%) and girls want to be teachers (16.1%), according to a survey by LinkedIn Corp, the world’s biggest professional-networking website.
As many as 30.3% of LinkedIn members surveyed said they either hold their childhood dream job or work in a career related to their childhood dream job, according to the report released on Monday.
The survey polled more than 8,000 members globally, including 415 from India, to find out the most common childhood career aspirations and the number of professionals holding their dream jobs. LinkedIn has a total of 187 million members worldwide, including 17 million in India.
Members who said they don’t have their childhood dream job were most likely to say they grew interested in a different career path as the primary reason why they work in an unrelated field (43.5%).
More than 70% surveyed said the most important characteristic of a dream job was taking pleasure in the work, followed by helping others (8%) and a high salary (6%).
“The dream jobs we aspire to as children are a window into our passions and talents," Nicole Williams, LinkedIn’s career expert, said in the report. “Identifying and understanding those passions are key to improving our performance and enjoyment of the jobs we currently do, even if they aren’t specific to the careers we dreamed of as kids."
LinkedIn also took a look at the number of members who claimed to have rather cool careers. For instance, over 95,000 LinkedIn members in India said they are fashion stylists, more than 30,000 said they are authors or publishers and over 22,000 said they are animators. As many as 49 claimed to be casino dealers and over 400 said they were wine and beer specialists.
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