How you inherit your career

Habits, staying with the known and contacts are among reasons so many Skarsgårds are visible on movie posters these days. 

  • Glenn Hysén, the Swedish footballer, passed on his career not only to one but two sons: Tobias and Anton Hysén are both notable soccer players.

  • Swedish soccer players Tobias and Anton Hysén inherited their careers from their father Glenn, and the acting brothers Alexander, Bill and Gustav inherited theirs from father Stellan Skarsgård.

  • Tobias Hysén plays at IFK Göteborg and is part of the Swedish national team. Bildbyrån photo

  • According to a study by Statistiska Centralbyrån (Sweden Statistics) ordered by the paper Du & Jobbet, every tenth Swede chooses to go in the footsteps of a parent.

  • Talent does indeed run in the family: Bill Skarsgård, center, flanked by his two acting brothers, Gustav and Alexander Skarsgård at the Scandinavian Film Festival in Los Angeles in January. Photo: Kerstin Alm

  • Mostly it’s fishers and hunters (37.1% of their offspring chose the same careers), but also nurses and hospital personnel tend to have children who choose the same type of work.

  • Chemists and physicists rarely run in the family - a notable exception being Marie Curie (1867-1934), winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, who passed on her career to daughter Irene Joliot-Curie (1897-1956), who passed it on to hers, and so on, making the Curie family one of France’s (and the world’s) greatest families of science.

  • Says Jan O Jonsson, professor of Sociology at Stockholm University: “Fishermen and farmers are classic groups where there is a high transference of heritage. It’s as if you inherit both the earth and the enterprise.”

  • According to Jonsson common reasons as to why we inherit our careers are the fact that it is well-known to us, there are possibilities in the form of our parents’ social network and contact, and we are also marked by our parents’ interests and values while we grow up. But there are also careers that we rarely inherit and those include: specialists in biology and forestry (0.8%), as well as physicists and chemists (0.9%).
    Source: www.duochjobbet.se, www.scb.se