Written By: Zachary Hill, Chief of Staff

Journey Before Destination: Why Students Need The Full Career Story

There is a quiet disconnect in how many adults talk to young people about work.

For students standing at the edge of adult life, that can do real damage. We often describe success as if it comes in one of two forms. Either you know exactly what you want, make the right choices early, and move steadily toward it. Or you drift, fall behind, and settle for less. It can make success look either immediate or impossibly far away.

But you and I both know, real careers, real life, rarely work that way.

Recently, I spoke with a community college student I will call Raul. Raul loved video games, but not for the reason some people might expect. What drew him in was storytelling. He spent years reading, watching films, and listening to writers talk about narrative craft, all while imagining that one day he might write stories for video games. Then, as he got older and started hearing from industry professionals, he learned something that rattled him. He was told he would need to understand coding and the back end of game development to succeed in the field. For a student who had never pictured himself as a coder, that new information did not feel like a next step. It felt like a locked door. The dream role had seemed vivid. The path to it had not. Once the path came into focus, he did not feel prepared. He felt disqualified.

Raul’s story is one version of a pattern many educators and employers have probably seen. Some students believe they should be able to leap straight into the role they want most. Others see the number of steps involved and decide the climb is too steep to be worth attempting. In both cases, the problem is not ambition. It is visibility. Students need a more realistic picture of what success looks like, what it takes to get there, and how many roads can lead from where they are to where they hope to go.

That matters because the American labor market itself is not especially linear. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 12.9 jobs between ages 18 and 58, with more than 5 of those jobs held before age 25 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Number of Jobs Held”). That statistic does not mean everyone changes careers constantly. What it does mean is that movement, adjustment, and course correction are normal parts of working life in the United States.

Students deserve to hear that from adults more often.

Consider Rebecca, a former theatre arts major who always knew she wanted to perform. She was not chasing stardom. She simply wanted a life as a working actor. She had experience, momentum, and a clear sense of purpose. Then life intervened. After marriage, her husband enlisted in the armed forces, and a move took her away from the community where she had built support, opportunities, and artistic footing. In her new location, the theatre scene was thinner, and the path she had counted on no longer looked workable. Eventually, she found a role at a teaching hospital, working as a performing patient to help future doctors and nurses practice bedside manner. It was not the exact version of success she might have imagined years earlier. It was, however, a deeply human example of adaptation. She found paid work that still drew on her talent, kept one foot in performance, and allowed her passion to remain part of her life.

That is the kind of story students need. Not because every detour is inspiring, and not because every compromise is easy, but because young people need to understand that changing shape is not the same as giving up.

They also need to hear from adults whose progress came step by step. Adrian Medel’s journey into professional audio did not begin with a major festival stage. It began with personal interest, then technical training, then an internship, then entry-level work, then local gigs, then stronger relationships, then bigger opportunities. Over time, those building blocks led to work with Rat Sound Systems, major festivals like Coachella and Stagecoach, and eventually a role helping build and operate audiovisual systems at Acrisure Arena. His story is not powerful because it was fast. It is powerful because each stage made the next one possible.

That is the message many students are missing. We often show them the destination and skip the sequence.

Current education guidance in the United States increasingly recognizes that students need more than a single path after high school. The National Center for Education Statistics recently highlighted the value of multiple postsecondary routes, including career and technical education, work-based learning, industry credentials, and dual enrollment, all of which can help students move toward career success in different ways (National Center for Education Statistics, “The Shift to Skills-Based Education and Hiring”). Research from the Institute of Education Sciences also suggests that career planning is more effective when students build plans with adult support and review them regularly, rather than being left to map their futures alone (Gibney and Rauner 2; Institute of Education Sciences, “How Individual Plans of Study Can Support Students”).

In other words, the status quo is not enough. It is not enough to ask students what they want to be. It is not enough to celebrate the most polished success stories. It is not enough to hand young people a goal without helping them imagine the road.

Educators and business professionals can do something simple and powerful instead. They can tell the whole story. The first job. The wrong turn. The skill learned unexpectedly. The season of doubt. The sideways move that turned out to matter. The point where persistence helped, and the point where flexibility did too.

When students hear those stories, they are not just learning about careers. They are learning how adult lives are actually built. Often slowly. Often imperfectly. Often with courage that looks a lot like recalculating.

Young people do not need a false promise that the climb will be easy. They need something better. A realistic picture of the road ahead, and the reassurance that there is more than one way to travel it.