Teaching Children About Careers in Technology and Engineering

As parents and carers, we all want to see our children thrive. A big part of that is helping them find their way in a world that looks very different from the one we grew up in. The words ‘technology’ and ‘engineering’ are everywhere, but they can feel distant and complicated, making it hard to know how to talk to a child about them.

The good thing is, you don’t need a degree in computer science to get started. This is about sparking curiosity, not delivering lectures. It’s about showing children the creative, problem-solving, and exciting side of a world they might only know through their screens.

What Are We Even Talking About?

Before we can get a child interested, it helps to get a clear picture ourselves. The image of a lone coder in a dark room is a persistent one, but it’s a tiny and often inaccurate part of the story.

Beyond the Code

At its heart, a job in technology is about using technical skills to create something useful or entertaining. Think about the apps on a phone. Someone had the idea, someone else designed what it should look like and how it should feel to use, and another person wrote the code to make it all work. They are all 'in tech'. It’s a team game, full of creative people.

Engineering is Everywhere

Engineering is even easier to spot once you know what to look for. It’s the discipline of designing, building, and maintaining the world around us. The car you drive, the bridge you cross, the electricity that powers your kettle, and the video game console in the living room are all products of engineering. It’s the practical magic of making things work, from massive structures to tiny circuits.

Lighting the Spark of Curiosity

You can begin to nurture an interest in these areas long before a child can even spell ‘algorithm’. It starts with encouraging their natural desire to ask ‘why?’ and ‘how?’.

Learning Through Play

For young children, the best tools are often the simplest. A pile of wooden blocks or a set of LEGO bricks is a playground for basic engineering principles. As they build, they’re instinctively learning about balance, structure, and design. You can nudge this along with gentle questions: “What do you think would make the tower stronger?” or “What happens if we use a wider base?”. There are no right or wrong answers, only discovery.

Next Steps and Days Out

As they get older, you can introduce activities that feel like the next level up. Free online tools like Scratch, developed by MIT, are a brilliant introduction to coding. It uses colourful, draggable blocks of commands, like digital LEGO, to let children create their own simple games and animations.

A trip to a science or industry museum can also be a fantastic way to make these ideas real. For any parent or foster carer fostering with an agency like Fostering People, sharing in these hands-on discovery days can be a wonderful bonding experience, especially for a child who might be exploring new talents for the very first time.

Connecting Their Passions to a Profession  

The most powerful way to make these careers feel relevant is to link them directly to what your child already loves to do.

For the Gamers

If your child is passionate about video games, they have a ready-made interest in a huge and creative industry. Talk to them about how games are made. There are the artists who design the characters, the writers who create the story, the sound designers who make the world feel real, and the programmers who piece it all together. Their hobby could be the first step towards a career in game design or software development.

For the Artists and Creators

A love of drawing and art is a huge asset in the digital world. Show them how graphic designers create the logos and visuals for their favourite brands, or how digital illustrators create characters for films and apps. The people who design beautiful, easy-to-use websites are often those with a keen artistic eye. Art and tech aren't two different worlds; they blend together in all kinds of creative jobs.

For the Tinkerers and Fixers

And what about the kid who loves to tinker? You know the one—always taking things apart to see the insides, fixing their own bike, or getting completely absorbed in a model kit. That desire to understand how stuff works is exactly the mindset of an engineer. It’s the kind of thinking that leads people into jobs like product design, robotics, or mechanics.

Showing Them They Belong

A child needs to see someone they can connect with in a certain job before they can imagine themselves doing it.

Find People Who Inspire

Try to actively find stories about all kinds of people doing great work in these fields. Hunt down books, videos, or movies about female inventors, pioneering black computer scientists, or engineers with disabilities who have achieved something special. Seeing someone you can relate to succeeding makes it so much easier for a child to think, "Hey, maybe I could do that too."

No One Works Alone

That old image of a solitary genius having a 'eureka' moment is mostly a myth. In reality, those big breakthroughs and amazing inventions are almost always created by a group of people working together.

The point of all this isn't to pigeonhole them into a specific job. When you feed their curiosity and let them see how they can be a part of shaping the world, you’re giving them a way of looking at things and a sense of self-belief. That's a gift that will help them in whatever they decide to do with their lives.