When You Don't Know What Career You Want

In May 2025, the OECD published a report based on 690,000 teenagers across 81 countries: 39% of 15-year-olds have no clear career expectations — twice the share from 2018. That's not a generation in crisis. It's a structural problem with three distinct roots, and each one calls for a different response.

Everyone gets asked what they want to be before they have the tools to answer. In middle school. Before college applications. At the admissions office. Each time you don't know, there's a small extra dose of anxiety that something is specifically wrong with you. There isn't. In May 2025 the OECD released "The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation" — a study of 690,000 teenagers in 81 countries — and found that 39% of 15-year-olds have no clear career expectations. A decade ago, the figure was roughly half that. Not knowing is now the majority position, not the exception.

Why "just try things" doesn't always work

The standard response to feeling lost is: try different things, see what sticks. It's reasonable advice — but only for one of three possible situations.

In 1996, Israeli psychologist Itamar Gati, along with Krausz and Osipow, published a taxonomy of career decision-making difficulties and built the Career Decision-Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ) around it. The instrument has since been translated into 48 languages and tested in over 60 countries — making it one of the most replicated frameworks in vocational psychology. Gati identified three clusters.

Cluster one: lack of readiness. You're anxious, you're putting it off, you're convinced any decision now will be the wrong one. The problem isn't missing information — it's that the stakes feel unbearably high.

Cluster two: lack of information. About yourself — which tasks actually give you energy versus which ones drain you. Or about specific careers — what the work actually looks like day to day, not what the job title implies. Or about the process itself — where to even start.

Cluster three: inconsistent information. You have options, but none clearly wins. Or your interests point one way while your family, the market, or your own fears pull another.

Trying new things helps with cluster two. In cluster one, new experiences tend to feel like pressure rather than data until the anxiety comes down first. In cluster three, more experiences rarely break a tie — what's missing is a clear priority, not more input.

What to do in each case

No readiness. Start by lowering the stakes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American holds 12 jobs over a career — several of those transitions involve switching fields entirely. The decision you make at 20 is not a lock for life; it's a direction for the next few years. Treating it otherwise is what makes it paralyzing.

No information about yourself. An interest assessment gives you real traction here. The RIASEC model translates vague feelings of "I like this" into a concrete profile, then matches that profile to careers by actual tasks — not job titles. If you don't know what pulls you, that's not laziness. It's missing data about yourself, and a good assessment is how you get it.

No information about careers. What a job looks like in a description and what it looks like on a Tuesday afternoon are usually different things. Reading about what people actually do before lunch — the specific decisions, the recurring tasks, the measure of a good day — is more useful than another list of "in-demand fields." Astrolab maps this for each career, with salary data specific to your country.

Inconsistent information. More options won't break the tie. What helps is making your priorities explicit: stability vs. flexibility, working with people vs. working alone, concrete output vs. long-cycle process. Once those are clear, the choice often resolves itself.

One uncomfortable fact about how career decisions actually work

In 1999, John Krumboltz and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Counseling & Development with an observation that still lands awkwardly: most significant career decisions are shaped by events people didn't plan for. A conversation that happened by accident. A book picked up for the wrong reason. An internship taken because a friend was going. Krumboltz called this "planned happenstance" — not because chance is planned, but because the person who stays in motion and notices the unexpected arrives at their career very differently from someone waiting for full clarity before taking the first step.

Krumboltz wrote that career counseling has traditionally tried to eliminate chance from career decisions — and that this is precisely what prevents people from using the unexpected opportunities that turn out to matter most.

Waiting for the moment when you'll "finally understand" has a poor track record. Uncertainty is a working condition, not a temporary malfunction.

Sources

1. OECD (2025). The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation. Based on PISA 2022 data (N = 690,000, 81 countries). oecd.org
2. Gati, I., Krausz, M., & Osipow, S. H. (1996). A Taxonomy of Difficulties in Career Decision Making. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 49(2), 151–168.
3. Mitchell, K. E., Levin, A. S., & Krumboltz, J. D. (1999). Planned Happenstance: Constructing Unexpected Career Opportunities. Journal of Counseling & Development, 77(2), 115–124. doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1999.tb02431.x
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. Number of Jobs, Labor Market Experience, and Earnings Growth: Results from a National Longitudinal Survey. bls.gov
5. National Center for Education Statistics (2018). Beginning College Students Who Change Their Majors Within 3 Years of Enrollment (NCES 2018-434). nces.ed.gov

This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute professional career counseling. The assessment result is an evaluation based on the RIASEC model, not a diagnosis.