Careers Guidance

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

The general lack of usefulness of careers guidance teachers has come up a lot in conversation recently. I know that the one we had in school was, while well-meaning, absolutely no use - it should, for instance, have been perfectly clear to anyone who looked at my academic record that I was more suited to arts than science, but she went along with the standard view of “intelligent boys should do science”. Although, being honest, she was a nun, and had other priorities; the number of guys in my class who reported that they’d been told she believed they had a vocation was impressive.

But thinking about it, what the hell can they do? How do you determine what a 16 year old might be good at, when a sizeable fraction of the jobs potentially available at 22 don’t exist yet? “Game testing” is now a perfectly valid career path - I know three or four game testers - but anyone proposing that in the early 90s to a careers guidance teacher would have got a blank look, and from the better ones, a gentle reminder of reality.

The job I’m doing now did not exist at all when I was 16, and barely existed by the time I was 19. I’ve been around for the invention of it, essentially. Most of my friends work in jobs that similarly did not exist. Careers guidance teachers did not know terms like “systems administration” in the 90s, “computer programmer” was barely on the horizon in their terms.

And it’s not just my techie friends, either. I can see a guy right now through the office window who’s cleaning the stonework with a very high-tech looking steam gun. He looks like he’s enjoying his work. Given that he’s driving a very shiny black SUV, with a registration plate from this year, I’m thinking he’s doing pretty well too. But I’ll bet his careers guidance teacher did not say “steam-cleaning stonework for corporate buildings, son, it’s a licence to print money”.

Go back another ten years, and the default assumption was that most of us would do the same jobs as our parents. I went to school with kids who lived on farms that their families had owned and worked on for four generations. The concept that any of them might not be farmers was both alien and unwelcome. There were a few non-farming families; instead, they’d been shopkeepers, steel cutters, or carpenters for similar lengths of time.

So, given that by the time the kids currently coming out of 2nd level education get into employment, the jobs they are doing will be things like “search refinement engineer” or “nanotechnology compensator”, or “bioinformatics controller”, or whatever, how can careers guidance counsellors possibly do anything useful? No wonder they’re all bitter.

And yet you can’t just get rid of them - kids need some guidance about college courses, or they’ll end up opting for an easy course in whatever college their best friend is going to. So… how do you offer careers guidance these days?