One thing I think would be kind of cool is personality profiling for jobs and careers.
I’ve never known what I wanted to be when I grow up. (Still don’t!)
It doesn’t help that people mostly talk about jobs in a task-oriented way, as opposed to experience-oriented. That is, we tend to talk about what you'll do, rather than what it’s LIKE. We presume that young adults have the necessary life experience to somehow fill in the gap.
I’d be curious to see what would happen if we gave high schoolers an overview of the traits of people who thrive in a given career.
For an ER doc, I’m imagining a list like
• Decisive
• Empathetic
• High stamina
• Stress- and chaos-tolerant
For data science, I'd recommend someone be
• Curious
• Analytical
• Detail-oriented
• Patient, with people and data
One caveat to this is that a lot of awesome things have come from people switching careers by melding two fields together.
At the same time…
I know of many people who completely abandoned their original path after a short stint in the real world, if they made it that far.
Ultimately, it’s kind of complicated, and I'm guessing that’s why we err on the side of letting people choose as they please (but possibly with a heavy dose of family influence). And lot of good things can happen regardless of which path is taken, they just might be very different good things.