Today’s youth ‘work-shy and lazy’ study finds
Findmypast.co.uk has just carried out a survey which has revealed that young Brits shy away from jobs that require hard graft and instead, one in six 18-24 year olds aspire to become a famous singer, actor or member of a band.
There has never been such a stark contrast between the career choices of today’s young people when compared to the manual jobs of their ancestors. In the 1911 census some of the most popular occupations recorded include working in domestic service, agriculture, mining, building and the cotton industry. In contrast, less than 1% of young Brits in the 21st century would like to have a manual job such as a builder or plumber.
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Most popular career choices in 2010
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Most popular occupations in the 1911 census
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1. Musician, famous singer or band member
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1. Domestic service
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2. Teacher/Lecturer
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2. Agriculture
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3. Sportsman/Woman
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3. Mining
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4. Actress/Actor
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4. Building
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5. Scientist
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5. Cotton industry
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Here you can see a 1911 census return for singer Tom Jones’ maternal grandparents, Albert Rees and Ada Jones, who were in the coal-mining industry. Jones is Tom’s stage rather than birth surname.
Click to enlarge
Debra Chatfield
Our marketing manager, Debra Chatfield (pictured right), says: “It seems the growing obsession with celebrity has really impacted on young people’s career choices these days, as our study reveals how the more non-traditional jobs now come high up on the wish-list.
“Times have certainly changed when it comes to young people’s career choices. A look at the 1911 census provides a fascinating insight into the professions of our ancestors and you can really see how times have dramatically changed. On the other hand, in some cases, it can be interesting to see how some families have carried the same profession down through the family tree to the modern day. In our recent study it was revealed that, worryingly, a fifth (22%) of those aged 18-24 years do not know what their ancestors did for a living.”
Find out what your ancestors did in our complete census records from 1841 to 1911.
Tags: 1911, 1911 census, career, Celebrity, youth
February 28th, 2010 at 1:20 am
This article is really interesting, and I liked finding out the ‘Top 5 Career Choices of 2010′ and ‘Most Popular Occupations of 1911′. However, I am astounded that the two have been compared and that it has been boasted that results show that today’s youth is ‘work-shy and lazy’. Career choices and Occupations are totally different things, yes today’s top career choice may be famous musician/singer but how many of us have actually become that? Not many. Along the same lines, how many of our ancestors would have actually chosen to go down the mines or work in the cotton mills? Not many, I’m sure.
A more interesting comparison would have been the most occupations which most of us actually hold today, against those held in 1911, which I think would show IT dominating much more than ‘hands on’ occupations such as plumber, baker, shoemaker etc.
Again I enjoyed this article, but the comparison doesn’t really work unfortunately.
February 28th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
I have to agree with Stacey’s comments here. The two items being compared do not allow the conclusions to be drawn that today’s youth are work-shy and lazy. That really is a spurious and misleading headline. As a University teacher my experience is that the majority of young people today are hard working and a long way from being lazy. Many of my students in “full-time” education, where we expect them to put in 40 hours of attendance at classes and studying have to hold down nearly full-time jobs to enable them to attend classes at all. And in these days of increasingly fractured families parental support and advice is frequently hard to come by. Young people today have a wealth of pressures upon them and I think we ought to be rather more charitable and supportive of their efforts to survive and to fulfill their potential; and certainly not provide more derogatory headlines based on invalid evidence.
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:51 am
Absolutely agree with comments. Debra Chatfield made a very naive comparison. Not only did our ancestors have no choice when they did manual labour or domestic service to survive, very few had any kind of educational opportunities. School leaving age was still 12 until 1914-18 war although a few managed a couple of years longer if the parents were willing and able to do without their income. In my family there is a teenager who became a soldier for 23 years who, along with some of his friends, had no other choice as there was only insecure casual labouring available, a grammar school boy who won a scholarship but wasn’t allowed to finish his education, taken out of school at 14 to work in engineering, a 14 year old girl obliged to be housekeeper to her large family AND work in domestic service because she was the oldest, a teenage novice monk who had to leave and go down mines to suport his younger brothers when his mother died because his father was a heavy drinker, plus the inevitable tales of our rural families where children as young as 6 missed school for days on end to do farm work whenever it was available because parents flouted the law to keep the family fed. Those who went into domestic service often did so to get a roof over their head and make room at home for the annually increasing number of children living in 2 or 3 rooms. Not one of them chose to do any of it and many had dreams of better things that they dared not voice and could not achieve. You also have to remember that with the decline of British heavy industry, shipbuilding, mining, fishing, mechanisation of farming, computerisation of factory assembly lines since WW2 many of the manual jobs no longer exist for today’s generation but there has been an explosion in administration, financial, IT and electronics employment that did not exist in 1911. The reality of life prevented many of us from achieving our hopes and dreams in the 60s and 70s too, even though it is regarded by some as a golden age of “freedom”
November 15th, 2010 at 4:00 am
fun
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