Seeking Roles, Not Ranks: Occupations in the Formation of Adolescents’ Career Aspirations

The occupational aspirations young people hold steer their educational decisions and guide their labor market trajectories, thereby channeling them into aspiration-specific socioeconomic pathways. They have long been understood as central in the intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage. Yet aspirations on the level of detailed occupations, and their dependence on parental occupations, have received little attention. This is because conventional accounts treat aspiration formation as rank-seeking, suggesting that adolescents seek status or prestige as a function of parental standing, with higher parental positions resulting in adolescents aspiring higher. Using recent data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and recent advances in the statistical modelling of network-type data, we show that aspirations are more than abstract socioeconomic ambition; they are distinctly role-seeking, with adolescents aspiring to specific occupations. Young people envision their future work lives in terms of explicit jobs and occupational roles. These occupationally anchored aspirations vary systematically with parental occupations, and this variation exists far beyond occupational ranks. Focusing on the occupation-to-occupation links between parents and children reveals a stronger intergenerational link than previously recognized, indicates aspiration formation to be more stratified than conventionally assumed, and opens new avenues for understanding the intergenerational transmission of inequality.