Careers Guidance

[gothwalk]

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?

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of it as career as verb rather than noun...

If I think about the jobs I've had, only one would have been predicted by my careers teachers.

1) electronics engineer desingin 5KW plus filters
2) software engineer developing design software for rail guns
3) research engineer specialising in local loop broadband
4) running tech for a national ISP
5) consultaqnt specialising in systems architecture for million user plus web applications
6) journalist writing about web development and service architectures

Hmm...

[wolfette]

my husband's careers' guidance teacher looked at him blankly when he said he'd like to consider a job in plumbing and replied "I've NO idea how you'd get into that - are you sure you don't want to be director of a plumbing company instead?"

(expensive private boys' school - most of the students' fathers would be directors or executives, not tradesmen)

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

I got told to consider 'philosophy of science and society' (at a technical university) I ended up doing philosphy with a minor in sociology of science (at a regular university). So that was pretty good.
Haven't done anything with it carreerwise though (no job on academic level due to illness - no idea how things would have gone otherwise)

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

“… 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.”

Do they actually prevent this? How?

I don't know if they introduced them after you left, but in 5th year we took aptitude tests to make her job easier; in my case this didn’t help at all, I scored in the same 3% band in all areas tested. But I knew I wasn’t going to stay on the farm.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

We did the aptitude tests as well, and in the same style, I was in the 99th percentile on all of them.

I'm not sure you can prevent the my-best-friend's-going-to-UCD-so-I-will-too thing, to be honest, but at least if you have someone there who can ask "Why have you put this course down first? Do you really want to do this? You're better at X" - and know what they're talking about - the kids will have to explain themselves.

And as a now-while-I-see-you thing, are you still in Germany? An old friend of mine turns out to be doing linguistics in Hamburg.

[kehoea.livejournal.com]

And as a now-while-I-see-you thing, are you still in Germany? An old friend of mine turns out to be doing linguistics in Hamburg.

Aye, noch immer in Deutschland. Hamburg's quite far away from me, though. I will be here at least until autumn of next year, and maybe longer; I intend to start another college course then, and as yet it's unclear if that’ll be here or in Ireland or maybe Britain. What brand of linguistics is your friend doing?

[(Anonymous)]

I believe it's to do with the patterns of how people break rules of grammar in ordinary speech. But it being linguistics, and linguistic theories being best measured in short half-lives, I'm not completely sure.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

(and that was me, from the wrong browser)

[nonhae.livejournal.com]

I'm watching how career guidance works at the minute cos of Martha heading for the Leaving Cert next year. I'm not sure that telling a 17 year old exactly what they should do is a good thing, rather pointing them in the direction of something that vaguely suits their interests and abilities. Now that's as much of a cop out answer as you're going to get, but sometimes it's best that way. How many people do you know who are currently working in the same field that their (first) college course was in? Certainly in my social circle I could count them on the fingers of one hand.

Personally I've come to consider any further education to be an extra time for growing the hell up and figuring out where you belong in the world. Those who go into trades or don't go to college seem to have a better idea of where they want to be than yer average 17 year old.

And to show that sometimes career guidance counsellors know what they're talking about, I was told to do nursing if I didn't want to go to college, or medicine if I did :) Took me 10 years to figure out for myself that that area's kinda where I belong...

[betsvc.livejournal.com]

This is a topic that tends to come up among my friends over a few drinks. It astounds me how abysmal the quality of career guidance in both schools and colleges.

Our school career guidance teacher, based on those DATS and CATS tests, told me I should become a laywer or diplomat (you may remember how diplomatic I am). However, what galls me was not his career predictions (you like English and French, lawyer and diplomat seem fairly obvious), but rather his complete lack of knowledge of almost every aspect of the college system in Ireland (don't get me started on trying to ask him about UK colleges). Upon being asked about subject options by some of my classmates after the Junior Cert, he neglected to mention that you needed chemistry to a girl who had stated an interest in veterinary science, he didn't tell another that if she gave up most of her subjects at honours level, she would be ineligible for most degree courses (even if she got straight A1s), he failed to warn a boy that if he gave up French, he couldn't go to any university in Ireland (at the time, it might be different now). Yes, they patently should have researched these things themselves, but not everyone was a nerd like me, poring over the Times educational supplement from the age of 12 and planning my escape. Moreover, this was his bloody JOB.

He was only bettered by the careers officer in Trinity, who faced with a roomful of Arts students, oh-so-tactfully suggested we all re-train in something useful like IT. Thanks, if we had any bloody ability in that direction, we would have studied it first off. No mention of the many different fields that we have all ended up in - only one of 30 students took up her only other suggested option, which was teaching. She could not tell us the closing dates for applications to do a Masters ... in Trinity. G.'s class of Bib-Theo students were told that 75% of previous graduates had become ministers. Ehh, could that be because in compiling your statistcs, you erroneously included the CITC students?

Still, it was kind of comforting that complete morons like these had clearly scored lucrative jobs. If they could, sure anyone can!

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I grew up in the era when no one thought girls could or would do anything science-y. So the guidance counselors were a complete waste of time. Fortunately, *I* knew I had a knack there, and that I wanted to pursue it... and that, given the prejudices of a co-ed school, I wanted to pursue it at a women's college. And that worked out fine, and I got my degree in chemistry.

Which, to be honest, I've done nothing with. My profs were keen on me doing graduate work in research- and I didn't and don't have the math for that. I can fake calculus to a point, but it slides off my brain. And no one told me there were other options...

Not that I'm sad about the way my life's gone. The technical and analytical skills I learned with chem have served me very well indeed in my metalwork.

So, I guess- I'd recommend that guidance counselors not look at specific career paths, but encourage kids to pursue the most rigorous academics they can handle successfully. It can't hurt. One of the reasons I did chem in college was because at the point at which I decided, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and most potential vets did biology- but chem was seen as "harder" and thus more attractive to admittance people. Vet school is still harder to get into than medical school for humans, by the way. :)

[bastun-ie.livejournal.com]

My career guidance teacher didn't get on with our form teacher, so we ended up getting two classes, total, between fifth and sixth year. One told us what CAO points we needed for various courses, another told us how to fill out the CAO form.

My half-sister's career guidance teacher is a reasonably well known singer. Her work placements were always in local shops (if a student didn't want to work in a shop, as in my sister's case, they had to find their own placement), and dozens of classes were missed because she was touring. How she (still!) manages to get away with it, I don't know.

Hmm. Do career guidance teachers ever say "You should be a career guidance teacher?" Maybe just to the students they hate...

[brucius.livejournal.com]

Due to my interest in computer games, It was recommended I do a computer science course, so i did, it sucked and I hated it, In reality I like computers because you need one to look at stuff on the internet and play games.

I did manage to remain drunk for the best part of two years, which looking back, may not have been the best way to go. Now I am two thirds the way through an apprenticeship and doing some part time studies through the OU.

All I ever wanted to do was make stuff which in turn would make me enough money to have the stuff I needed, but I don't think anyone can guide you into doing what you want to do. It's a bit like someone telling you who to go out with.