It's a simple fact of teenage life that your parents know nothing. Boring, out-of-touch, trying to be your friend on Facebook (as if anyone uses that anymore, duh!) - you can't trust their opinions on anything. Unless, it seems, you're a teenager looking for help with some of the biggest and most important things in life: your education and future career. A recent report by the Association Of Colleges found that parents were the first port-of-call for most young people when seeking careers advice, with 70% saying they trusted mum and dad, compared to 57% who went to their teachers.So does this prove that parents really do know best after all? Well, not really, since the report also revealed that parents are probably even less in tune with the vicissitudes of the current jobs market than they are with the dubstep scene, with AOC President Michele Sutton saying they are 'struggling to keep up-to-date with current and future work trends'. And of course, relying on your parents to pick you out a career they think you might like has much deeper consequences than letting them choose your clothes for you: the latter might result to a few hours of embarrassment, but the former could lead to a lifetime of frustrated ambition.Or worse, since parents encouraging their offspring to become doctors or lawyers - the sort of traditional jobs they understand - not just risks young people ending up on a course not suited to their talents, but has a wider potential impact on the economy as a whole, which is now facing a skills shortage in key industries. This is most pronounced in the technology sector, as demonstrated by an O2 report that estimated that Britain will need 750,000 workers with advanced digital skills by 2017. Yet currently only 7,500 students take computer science degrees a year, meaning that many of the 20,000 graduate vacancies in the software industry alone remain unfilled each year. This is compared to the twice that number of students who take medicine degrees, competition for places on which is now so high that Universities minister David Willetts has said students should consider studying STEM (Science, technology, engineering, maths) courses instead, both to avoid disappointment for themselves and to meet industry's demand for workers with qualifications in these subjects. The O2 report also finds parents at fault, with one in 10 saying they would 'actively discourage' their children from jobs in the digital sector, while 38% would advise them to go into law or medicine.
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