This informal CPD article ‘The Quiet Questions Students Are Asking About the Future’ was provided by Francisco Mergulhão, Facilitator at Catalystia, a dedicated platform for aspiring and practicing career counselors committed to shaping student futures with purpose- one student at a time.
The most consequential conversations in school counselling rarely happen during the appointment. They happen just after it. A student lingers by the door once the university list has been put away. An email arrives late on a Sunday evening. A question is dropped in a corridor, phrased so lightly that it would be easy to answer just as lightly.
Those moments are usually where the real question surfaces. What students bring us is seldom, in the end, about degrees, majors or careers. It is about uncertainty, belonging, and whether the world they are walking into will have room for them. Beneath almost every practical enquiry sits a version of the same question: will I be okay?
That question deserves better than just reassurance. Young people are making decisions under conditions their parents did not face — rapid technological change, unsettled labour markets, and a proliferation of pathways that did not exist a generation ago. Learning to hear what a student is actually asking may be the most useful thing a counsellor can practise.
The question behind the question
When a student asks which university has the highest graduate employment rate, they are rarely asking about employment rates. They are asking whether the decision they make this year will still make sense in ten. Whether they are getting it right. Whether the future feels as unstable to everyone else as it does to them.
The doubt is well founded. The sequence they were promised — study hard, earn the degree, secure the career — no longer necessarily runs automatically, and students can see that it does not. McKinsey’s global education-to-employment research put numbers to the gap: across nine countries, 45 percent of young people believed they had been adequately prepared for an entry-level position in their chosen field and 42 percent of employers agreed, while 72 percent of education providers believed graduates were ready for work (1). Students are not imagining the disconnect between education and employment. They are standing on the wrong side of it.
This is why so many of their questions reach past education itself.
Will artificial intelligence take my future job?
This is now the question education professionals are asked most often, and it arrives in every year group. Students read about automation reshaping industries and reasonably wonder whether the careers they are weighing will still exist by the time they are qualified to enter them. What they are really asking is narrower and more anxious: is it worth preparing for something if technology may change everything?
The honest answer is that nobody knows which roles will evolve, disappear or emerge. But the shape of the change is not unprecedented. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that around 170 million roles will be created and 92 million displaced by 2030 — a net increase of some 78 million jobs — with roughly 39 percent of workers’ core skills expected to change over the same period (2). Technology has historically altered the composition of work rather than abolishing it, and the current evidence points the same way.
That reframing matters for practice. If the job title is unstable but the underlying demand is not, preparation should be aimed at capabilities rather than destinations. The same report finds analytical thinking to be the core skill employers rate most highly, with seven in ten calling it essential, followed by resilience, flexibility and agility, and by leadership and social influence; creative thinking, curiosity and lifelong learning are all rising in expected importance (2).
Students do not need certainty about the future. They need evidence that they can adapt to it.
Is university still worth it?
This question is appearing more often, and it is not an unreasonable one. Students are aware of rising costs, alternative credentials, apprenticeships and technical pathways, and of prominent success stories that bypassed higher education entirely.
The evidence still favours a degree on average. The OECD’s Education at a Glance series continues to record higher employment rates and a clear earnings advantage for tertiary-educated adults across member countries, while also documenting the strong labour-market position of well-designed vocational and technical qualifications (3). Averages, however, are not advice. They describe a population; a student is deciding for one person.
At many schools, not every student goes to university immediately. Some enter work directly, some pursue vocational or technical education, some take a year. None of these is inherently right or wrong. Beyond the qualification, university offers access to networks, mentors, internships and professional communities that are difficult to assemble any other way — and for many students that access is the substantive value. For others, it is not what they need next.
The useful question is therefore not whether university is worth it. It is whether it is the right next step for this student, for reasons they can articulate.
University offers access to networks
What if I choose the wrong thing?
Underneath the questions about technology and pathways sits a more personal one, and it is usually the hardest to say out loud. Students face more options than any previous generation, and abundance is not costless. Research work on student choice describes how an expanding range of alternatives raises expectations of the decision, increases the anticipation of regret, and makes the chooser more likely to hold themselves responsible for any disappointment that follows (4). A student paralysed in front of a course list is not being indecisive. They are responding rationally to a decision that has been made to feel enormous.
It is worth saying plainly that very few of these decisions are permanent. Careers are rarely linear; people change industries, add qualifications, start things, and reinvent themselves several times. Further research work on career construction treats adaptability as the central resource for exactly this environment — the capacity to anticipate change, explore possible selves, exercise control over transitions, and hold the confidence to act on what one finds (5). Adaptability can be developed. A perfect first choice is not on offer.
What students often need from us is not a better answer but permission: to treat uncertainty as normal, and exploration as a legitimate method rather than evidence of a wandering mind.
Is there a place for someone like me?
For some students, particularly those from backgrounds under-represented in the pathways they are considering, another question surfaces more quietly: do people like me belong in spaces like that?
A further study defined adolescence as the period in which identity is worked out and argued that the process depends on recognition — that a young person’s sense of who they are is confirmed, or withheld, by the community around them (6). Students look for that recognition, and they look for it in evidence. When they encounter mentors, alumni or professionals whose route feels recognisable, an abstract aspiration becomes a concrete one, and the question shifts from whether someone like them can succeed to how they might get there. Representation is not a soft consideration. It is what makes possibility legible.
Does any of this actually matter?
The quietest question is whether any of the effort means anything in a world changing this fast. Students are growing up amid economic uncertainty, technological disruption and environmental pressure, and some of them are unconvinced that the system they are working inside is preparing them for what they can see coming.
This deserves acknowledgement rather than correction. Students do not need false confidence from adults. They need adults willing to sit with complexity honestly, and to help them find where their own contribution might fit.
What this asks of education counselling
The first thing is to build conditions in which these questions can be said out loud. Much of the value of counselling lies not in supplying answers but in helping a student articulate the question beneath the question, and in leaving space for uncertainty rather than closing it down. Uncertainty is not a symptom of failure; it is the ordinary condition of navigating a complex system.
The second is honesty about the limits of what we know. Students respect that. They do not expect us to forecast the labour market of 2040 — they expect us to help them think about it carefully.
The third is to move students from speculation towards experience. Internships, mentoring, projects and volunteering answer questions that no amount of information can. Confidence does not arrive because an adult asserts that a student is capable. It arrives when the student has watched themselves be capable and can carry that evidence into the next decision.
The quiet questions are not problems to be solved. They are invitations into a longer conversation, and the invitation usually matters more than the answer. Questions about artificial intelligence, higher education, belonging and choice are, at bottom, questions about how a young person sees themselves in a world that will not hold still. The task is not to remove the uncertainty. It is to help students build the confidence, adaptability and self-knowledge to move through it — and, in time, to meet it with curiosity rather than fear.
We hope this article was helpful. For more information from Catalystia, please visit their CPD Member Directory page. Alternatively, you can go to the CPD Industry Hubs for more articles, courses and events relevant to your Continuing Professional Development requirements.
REFERENCES
(1) McKinsey Center for Government. Education to Employment: Designing a System that Works, 2012. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/education-to-employment-designing-a-system-that-works
(2) World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025, January 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
(3) OECD. Education at a Glance 2022: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing, 2022. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2022_3197152b-en.html
(4) Schwartz, B. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Harper Perennial, 2004.
(5) Savickas, M. L. Career Counseling. American Psychological Association, 2011.
(6) Erikson, E. H. Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. W. Norton, 1968.
