You didn’t know the first thing about jobs when you were five. Jobs were what grownups did. Why they bothered was anyone’s guess. Quite frankly, it was masochistic – why spend eight hours in a boring room when you could watch the Cbeebies channel all the time? I mean, how could you not want to? The Cbeebies channel is right there, all day. Intriguingly however, you would sometimes find that Johnny’s mummy or Katie’s daddy did something that was super super cool, and sometimes they had special assemblies for super super cool mummies and daddies who came in to tell us what they did. And they often looked like they had stepped right out of one of those Dorling Kindersley picture books with ‘My First’ in the title. Wow, you thought, I want to be just like that. One day I really want to be a…

Policeman/Policewoman

Once upon a time you could let someone take a hit to the jugular and run off with their pouch of groats without even getting an ASBO. The classic ‘bobby on the beat’, nicknamed after Tory reformer Robert Peel who created London’s Metropolitan Police force in 1829, has always been a staple figure in quaint children’s programmes based in small-to-economically-unviable-sized settlements. In Grown-up Land, things are less pedestrian in the big bad boroughs. The constable’s helmet is, these days, heavily oversubscribed. An alternative popular route is through becoming a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO), or you can volunteer a few hours a week as a ‘special constable’. To wield the truncheon, however, requires passing the Police Initial Recruitment Test, which only around 8% of candidates succeed in doing. And with frequent new reports of cuts to policing, that’s a high sense of duty on a thin blue line indeed.

Pilot

If you regret being born too late for the Battle of Britain, or hanker after the Mad Men school of sex appeal, Tom Cruise and Leonardo Di Caprio will have likely struck a chord with your aspirations. Many of us do find ourselves charmed by the idea of flight, frustratingly enticed by Frank Sinatra or flagrantly misled by the promises of Red Bull. When we were wee ones no one thought to remind us that stretching out both arms and wheeling them about in errant mid-sprint was unlikely to achieve lift, nor one of BA’s requisite competencies. Traditionally many civil aviation pilots are ex-air force, not least because private training to get aloft is pretty damn expensive. BA does actually have a ‘Future Pilot Programme’, training people up from scratch, but naturally such a rarity is keenly seized upon. Its inaugural year in 2011 received around 3,500 hopefuls for just 80 places – a success rate of about 0.02%.

Princess

Work experience is slightly tricky for this one. Needless to say the straight answer is that going to St Andrews probably helps. Otherwise, hedge your bets on being an American divorcée, a real fun gal, or just hanging about like a canny old bird for a few decades. Many prepubescent girls seem worryingly party to the belief that this is actually a viable career option. Are you still looking for that movie-miracle morganatic marriage? I hate to say it, but you might want to put it on the back burner when you get to final year. The odds of having a Notting Hill moment at 1am in Camera aren’t great. (Not even in VIP.) Besides, what’s going for it? You don’t even get to meet Ricky Tomlinson. In the half-imagined words of Bob Diamond, there are probably better perks at Barclays.

Firefighter

For an animated Welsh public sector worker, Fireman Sam deals with an unsettling level of negligence in the valleys. I don’t know if you missed it, but some major shit went down since the last time you saw him. To our recollection, the only fun part was the bit where you go down the pole, although it must be said that ‘fireman slides down pole’ is not a recommended search on Google Images, so perhaps better simply to recall the joy of it. If the likes of Ladder 49 does inspire you to pass babies out of burning buildings, there’s some way to go yet. In the UK there are also six National Firefighter Physical Tests: a 13.5-metre ladder climb in PPE (as Oxford students we of course know that’s Personal Protective Equipment), evacuating a 55kg casualty, lifting the mass of a ladder, crawling under simulated smoky conditions, and carrying and assembling equipment like hoses and pumps. The armed forces have their own fire services, as do airports, which are looked after by the BAA Fire Service. Full-time firefighting jobs are here and there but many places look favourably upon you if you’ve offered your services as a retained firefighter – a firefighter on-demand. In superhero-like vision it entitles you to sprint out of work to attend upon those half-baked babies.

Ballet dancer

Did Black Swan put you off? No? Great, we’ll continue. Think happy thoughts of County Durham mining families instead. After-school ballet or dance practice will have been a familiar segment in the earlier lives of many female readers, but as Natalie Portman manages to convey – though maybe a smidgen harshly – becoming prima ballerina assoluta is an un-dainty, if not gruelling ask, and can indeed carry physical risks. Unpalatable as you may imagine sober gyration in clubs to be, it pales alongside the thought of starting out at the age of three, which is by no means unusual, and becoming professional before you’re big enough to upgrade from the log flume at Alton Towers. As with any other artistic or sporting profession, fierce competition lays every step of the way, so getting in there as soon as you can walk, as well as being talented, diligent, and unwaveringly committed, helps. The best of the bunch might end up at one of the professional ballet schools, such as the English National Ballet School or the Royal Ballet School, or if you’ve got something special, the prestigious Bolshoi Academy in Russia. On making it through, you’ll have to join a company – often the one the ballet school is affiliated with. Even then you might find you’re good enough for the corps (the background dancers) – but not good enough to be a soloist. In the eponymous film, Billy Elliot’s answer to what inspires him about ballet is simply, “The dancin’.” And when he says, “I don’t want a childhood. I want to be a ballet dancer”, we figure he probably had the right attitude after all.

Astronaut

Growing up with the dregs of the Cold War freshly behind us, the glory days of going beyond the ionosphere could not fail to inspire the intrepid. Like Buzz Lightyear, we may fall back from our aspirations, but the sky’s never the limit for the young at heart and the obsessively dedicated. We have a problem though, Houston. It is exceptionally tough. The UK Space Agency is famously based in that most otherworldly of places, Swindon, but doesn’t actually fund any manned space research. NASA’s program is tops, but NASA only recruit every few years, with only a handful of international selectees. Short of forking out yourself, your best bet is to follow the lead of five of the six British people who have been into space, and actually become American. Also a plus is being an unashamed geek for science, like Michael Foale (a contemporary of Stephen Fry at Cambridge, who once made fun of him for saying he wanted to go into space), and perhaps have flown very big dangerous things before, like Major Timothy Peake, the newest British astronaut to have been selected via the European Space Agency. And talking about requirements doesn’t even broach the black-hole-pressure of selection and training. One of the things you have to be able to do to get on NASA’s two-year course is to swim three lengths of a swimming pool non-stop in full flight suit and tennis shoes. You need more than a doughty dash of determination to ruin a good pair of those.

Dinosaur hunter

We used to be nuts about dinos – a credit to Mr Spielberg, who made the idea of going into densely forested areas looking for old things that could possibly kill you seem like a right lark. The BBC caught on and did their thing, and Disney even released a film about an orphaned specimen making a long and arduous journey, although sadly before long we all started getting interested in another orphan and another long and arduous journey. You may not have heard of the Cambrian, the Devonian, or the Palaeogene, but you probably have heard of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous; and everyone knows of the ‘terrible lizard’, tyrannosaurus rex. (Although, interestingly, not the biggest lad around.) When is an unhealthy obsession with wanting Indiana Jones’ whip not merely risqué? When you think you could be one assembling the bones in the Natural History Museum, that’s when. For that honour, you’ll need to be an earth scientist, biologist, or geologist, with a masters and a doctorate under your belt soon enough as well. Having dug your way all through education, it’s then a case of getting that research funding and digging some more. People can pay to go on short digs, but it’s some way better to be in a position where you can have some bitch of a carnivore named after you, or have the pleasure of naming it yourself.

Spy

Ian Fleming’s most famous creation feels implausibly distant to our humdrum lives, though funnily enough both the Security Service, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, have graduate recruitment pages and profiles. (You need a 2.1.) The official use of the term ‘agent’ is actually better described as an informant, although in wonderfully classic bureau-speak they are technically known as ‘covert human intelligence sources’. James Bond would be what is called an MI6 ‘operational officer’; the MI5 equivalent is an ‘intelligence officer’. Bond is an old-school prodigy, having studied at Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, but some things don’t change: Bond read Oriental Studies, and MI6 are still keen in this day and age on hearing from any Mandarin speakers. MI6’s website provides a ‘virtual tour’ of the organisation, which seems pretty surprising, though helpfully: ‘There are no pictures of actual SIS employees or interiors on this virtual tour.’ Understandably you aren’t allowed to tell anyone about your application, so don’t be too quick to judge that otherwise genius finalist who appears to be ambivalently faffing around. If you’re clean, stable, and have the balls, you can apply here, but suffice to say yours truly clicked through two pages and totally wussed out.

Doris Day would have a rubbish time in the twenty-tens. No longer can you rattle off a woolly “que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be” as legit careers advice to your precocious, socially aspirational nine-year-old. The very thought might make you yearn for the halcyon days of ‘jobs for life’. Back when you could pat them reassuringly, then proceed to seize them by the scruff of the neck and throw them back outside to accumulate hopscotch bruises on the cobbles while your local MP trundled past in one of them Morris Minors.

Thankfully, modern parenting needn’t be awkward. Pack them off to the nearest careers fair – it’s fantastic they’re thinking about work experience this early. Given that we are now all guaranteed to graduate with albatross-shaped millstones that will leave our naïve hopes in grim tatters, they may as well be trying to get an edge ahead of their starry-eyed peers. Plus, ‘chimney sweep’ is a great addition to any CV.