STEM Career Exploration
Most career education programs for children tell kids what scientists do. They describe the job, explain the pathway, list the skills required. What they rarely do is let children meet a real scientist — someone with a face and a story and a specific thing they’re trying to figure out — and think: that could be me.
That distinction matters more than most people realise. Information about careers changes behaviour at the margins. Identity — the sense that science is something you could genuinely belong to — changes trajectories.
Why career exposure works differently in childhood
Career exploration in adulthood is largely a matter of information gathering. You assess your skills, research options, and make decisions based on what you know about yourself and the available paths.
In childhood, something different is happening. Children are in the process of forming their sense of self — who they are, what they’re capable of, what kind of person they might become. The career information they encounter at this stage doesn’t just inform a decision. It shapes the identity that will later make decisions.
Research consistently shows that children’s perceptions of who scientists are — what they look like, how they talk, what their lives are like — form early and prove resistant to change. A child who has internalised a narrow image of ‘a scientist’ will filter out evidence that contradicts it. A child who has met many kinds of scientists — across ages, backgrounds, and fields — has a broader canvas on which to imagine themselves.
The problem with abstract career education
The typical format for STEM career education — a video, a poster, a unit on ‘jobs of the future’ — treats careers as information to be communicated rather than identities to be inhabited.
Abstract career content doesn’t produce the psychological effect that career exploration is meant to produce. It doesn’t make a child feel that they could do that. It makes them feel that someone does that.
The difference is the difference between knowing that marine biologists exist and having met one who was funny and specific about the questions they’re currently trying to answer, whose work felt genuinely uncertain and genuinely interesting. The second experience is what builds a connection between the child’s sense of self and the possibility of a science career.
What meeting real scientists actually does
In Arludo, students encounter real scientists across a range of fields — marine biology, robotics, renewable energy, biomedical research, space systems — through short video profiles embedded in the app. These aren’t generic career descriptions. They’re specific people with specific work, talking about what genuinely occupies them.
The effect is measurable in how children talk about it. Students don’t say ‘I learned that marine biologists study the ocean.’ They say ‘I met a marine biologist who’s trying to figure out why coral reefs are dying.’ The specificity changes the relationship. The person becomes imaginable.
When children can imagine themselves in a role — not just understand that the role exists — something shifts in how they approach science. The learning feels connected to a possible future self rather than disconnected from any future they can conceive.
The link between identity and persistence
One of the most robust findings in science education research is that identity predicts persistence more reliably than ability. Students who see themselves as science people continue with science when it gets harder. Students who don’t — regardless of their test results — tend not to.
This effect is already present in primary school. The children who persist through secondary school STEM and into STEM careers are disproportionately the children who, at age ten or eleven, already thought of science as something that belonged to them.
Career exploration in early primary school is not premature. It is timely. The question isn’t whether a ten-year-old should be choosing a career. The question is whether that child’s sense of self includes the possibility of a science future — because that inclusion or exclusion will shape choices for decades.
What parents and teachers can do
The most important thing adults can do is make career exploration feel personal rather than informational.
When a child encounters a scientist in the app, the most valuable follow-up question isn’t ‘What does that scientist do?’ It’s ‘Was there anything about that person that reminded you of yourself?’ or ‘What would you want to ask them if you could?’ These questions connect the scientist’s identity to the child’s, rather than treating the scientist as an object of study.
Teachers can extend this by inviting real professionals into the classroom — not to give career talks, but to share what questions they’re currently trying to answer. The specificity of real uncertainty is more compelling to children than polished presentations of completed success.
Australia has extraordinary scientific talent across a wide range of fields. One of the most powerful things we can do for the next generation of Australian scientists is make sure children can actually see them — and see themselves in them.
About the Author
Professor Michael Kasumovic is an evolutionary biologist at UNSW Sydney and the founder of Arludo. His research explores how social interactions and playing video games alter how people perceive themselves — and how that shapes their behaviour. He has used Arludo in his own university teaching for 10 years and built the platform to turn that research into something kids, teachers, and parents actually want to use together.