Lawyer Beats Astronaut In Survey Of Childhood Dream Jobs

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By Alex Aldridge on

A LinkedIn survey has found that law is the sixth most common dream job, making it a more widely held aspiration than becoming an astronaut, writer or professional athlete.

But as you can see in the list below, law (the dream job of 3.9% of those surveyed) is no match for engineering (7.7%) or being a pilot (7%) – the two most popular childhood career dreams in the survey of 8,000 professionals worldwide…

Top 10 most common childhood dream jobs (source: LinkedIn)

1. Engineer (7.7%)

2. Airplane or helicopter pilot (7%)

3. Doctor, nurse or EMT (6.7%)

4. Scientist (6.2%)

5. Teacher (5.8%)

6. Lawyer (3.9%)

7. Writer, journalist or novelist (3.7%)

8. Astronaut (3.2%)

9. Veterinarian (3%)

10. Professional or Olympic athlete; Actors (both 2.7%)

Taken as a whole, the results mean that a mere 8.9% of those surveyed work in their childhood dream job, although an additional 21% said they at least work in a career that relates to their original dream job.

Almost half of those who didn’t realise their childhood professional dreams said this was because they became interested in a different career as they got older, while 16% put it down to their dream job being either too difficult or too expensive to pursue.