Careers advice

[davywavy]

Back when I was at school we used to have what were optimistically called 'Careers Lessons'. On paper these sessions were supposed to help us prepare for the world of work, but in reality they varied between an hour-long doss on a Friday afternoon and an hour of patronisingly suggesting to the girls in class that hairdresser was a valuable and fulfilling career. At no point were we taught anything useful, like how to write a CV, how to track socioeconomic trends for indicators of what skillsets were likely to be of use to the employment market in future, or how to negotiate the welfare system.

From time to time, though, we'd be given some sort of aptitude test which would tell us what career we were perfectly suited for. By simply ticking a few boxes, the checklist (or the computer - we were very technologically advanced) would narrow down the options of our futures to the ideal outcome. Naturally it told me I should become an airline pilot. Or a bank teller. I'm still waiting.

I was thinking about this last night. Does anyone - ever - end up in the career that careers advisors tell them is ideal for them? Anyone?

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Server virtualisation didn't even exist^* when I had careers lessons, and that was only about 15 years ago. Actual genuine experts in any given field don't know what jobs are going to exist in another fifteen years, so it's a pretty tall order to expect Mr. Shaw the Geography teacher to know.

* Well, it did, but it was in the extreme pre-market phase, and wouldn't gain mainstream practicality for nearly a decade

[(Anonymous)]

We had to do a questionnaire in the Sixth Form, which would be fed into a computer running a program called "Cascaid." Those were in the days when the printout came back on great long concertinas of that green stripy paper, with printer holes punched down either side.

It told me I ought to be a Meteorologist, bizarrely enough. I tried to keep this quiet in class when questioned, for fear of attracting some new comedy nickname, possibly the name of the then BBC Weather forecaster. But luckily the teacher didn't dwell on it
or explore it further. So I assumed they thought it was as dopey a suggestion as I did.

H

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

I filled out my little ticky-box form in 1983. I'm currently a website editor, a job that didn't exist in 1983. So no, I didn't end up in any of the careers my advisors suggested. But I can't really blame them in this case.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I deliberately left that ambiguous.

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

Mine suggested I do something arty, and I'd actually like to be doing something arty. Sadly those lessons didn't go on to actually tell me what the best way to go about becoming an interior designer or stage prop painter was (or whatever else it said along those lines). So I've spent the last 15 years first stumbling around different jobs, then deciding that I'd rather be a student again, then taking my first tentative steps towards the only viable option left - becoming a crazy cat lady. I think I may have actually found my calling with the last one.

[kashinthegreen.livejournal.com]

Pathologist, radiologist or... forest ranger.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'd've gone for ranger myself. 2D8 hit points at first level is unbeatable.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure we really had an aptitude test. I think the general opinion was that as long as you passed the exams they didn't really care what happened later.

For the hard of herring

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

At least one of the 'Cascaid' family of careers-advice-by-questionnaire systems defaults to a WTF answer when none of the matches rises above a preset threshold of statistical confidence:

Fish Curer and Smoker

I'll let you guess how I found this out...

Re: For the hard of herring

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I always assumed that's what you did for a living? Am I wrong?

Re: For the hard of herring

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe the school could get you a plaicement somewhere

H

What's my line?

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Not quite: I had to give up smoking as it is incompatible with my work as a Complimentary Therapist for fish.

I am a homeopathic vetinary sturgeon.

Re: What's my line?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I tried that once, but homeopathic tincture of cat just tastes like Carlsberg.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

I did actually... although I did divert and try to be an entomologist at uni. I found all my old 1980s career leaflets when I was looking out my certificates too! Maybe I should scan them in (mostly for the haircut lols).

One thing I REALLY wish we'd had were lessons in finance though: how mortgages work, lending/borrowing, saving, pensions etc etc

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

It really winds me up that Home Economics has been dropped from the curriculum. Given that we're raising another generation to live on sixty-five nicker a week, you'd think it only fair to teach them how to budget.

[thefon.livejournal.com]

I remember thinking "I could write better software than this!" so the careers advice program did actually help me.