We asked a nationally representative sample of adults: ‘When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?’ The rankings look quite different between the genders. Also, not many boys wanted to be vets and not many girls wanted to be professional drivers or sportspeople. Interestingly, there were no significant differences when analysed by current income.

Success rates are low, across all the grownups, only 15% of them are doing the job they wanted to do as a kid.

That breaks down in the major groups to 16% of the aspiring doctors/nurses, 10% of teachers/professors and only 7% of potential vets ending up in their childhood dream job.

The dominant reason for not achieving the childhood goal was simply losing interest and pursuing something else.
Amongst those that thought their dream was unrealistic though were aspiring mechanics, vets, a pilot, farmer, writer, teacher, archaeologist and zookeeper. However, this group were joined by a potential Power Ranger, time traveller, mermaid and a couple of princesses.