Opinion
The careers advice for my daughters is obsolete rubbish - they might as well aim for a job at Kodak
James Panichi
JournalistSchool career advisers are like a backwards Google. You can ask them any question you want, but they’ll only have one answer: journalism.
For years, my daughter has been coming home with a report from her school’s counsellor; there’s also something called the Morrisby Profile, which measures up their prospects through an Orwellian algorithm that’s decoupled from reality.
Modern careers advice may be powered by an algorithm but it seems hopelessly out of date.Credit: Getty Images
On all occasions, she’s been urged to consider a career in media. A student who can spell while also enjoying movies is told to consider film reviewing; if you’re studying a foreign language, maybe the life of a foreign correspondent is for you.
Just when you think it can’t get any worse, my daughter’s performance in a couple of school musicals was enough for the algorithm (or the mischievous counsellor) to suggest podcasting. As a career. Something that will support you and make payments into a super fund.
My daughter thinks it’s hilarious. While not taking the counsellor’s advice, she enjoys watching me, a journalist clinging to the wreckage of the media industry, become enraged.
Seriously, though — if it’s not morally reprehensible to direct kids towards careers in an industry no longer underpinned by a business model, then why stop at journalism?
School leavers could become blacksmiths. Or lamplighters. Or switchboard operators. The school could help them ring Kodak from a rotary phone and apply for a job as a camera-film developer. The world of the 1970s is their oyster.
It should be clear to everyone that journalists are being retrenched throughout the industry, with millennials reluctant to pay for news and tech giants hoovering up advertising revenue.
And I’m not the only parent bristling. One of my kids’ schoolmates made the mistake of saying she owned a pet and enjoyed the outdoors and was mortified by the recommendation that she become a dog walker. Even a 16-year-old knows that’s not serious advice.
Meanwhile, my other daughter was told that a career in ophthalmology was a match. She wasn’t alone — apparently half of the kids in her science class were told to consider the same clinical specialisation.
Don’t get me wrong — some of my best friends are ophthalmologists. And for all I know, there may indeed be a dearth of doctors wanting to spend hours at parties telling people that they’re not optometrists. But it seems such a narrow career path for children still finding their place in the world.
Second on the list of careers recommended for my daughter? Security intelligence operative. Seriously – I’ll send you the screenshot.
Again, no disrespect towards Australia’s spying community, which we all admire — the 2004 bugging of the East Timor Palace of Government was top-notch and definitely legal. I also don’t object to raising a schoolgirl’s awareness of how an ophthalmology practice could be a perfect cover.
But for someone still developing her interests, the advice seems restrictive.
I’m not privy to the data underpinning the algorithms, or the methodology of the career counsellors. But I suspect I know what is going on.
Many of us are hostage to what is the most liberating yet obscene middle-class privileges of them all: the belief that we need to find something we enjoy rather than considering industries that are going to need workers in the future.
This has placed the emphasis on searching for professional satisfaction, to the detriment of whether the industry we choose can support us. Hence journalism, or the other go-to recommendation for kids expressing even the vaguest interest in creative arts: film production.
It’s not so much the fact that career counsellors are under the misapprehension that rivers of advertising gold are still flowing into the media industry. My concern is more about the failure to suggest paths that could be both intellectually and financially rewarding and actually of use to Australian society over the next 20 years.
We’ll need people to manage the generative AI revolution, early childhood educators, project managers to oversee our sustainability challenges and engineers to help build all that military hardware we have commissioned.
Meanwhile, tertiary institutions provide courses without regard to the career prospects afforded by sunset industries. You’d be hard-pressed to find a university that doesn’t offer media studies, for example. Or film production.
Even more importantly, though, rather than arm-twisting students into training for specific jobs, we should be encouraging them to consider general science or arts degrees to build up the critical faculties they will need to tackle any job — including those nascent professions that have yet to earn a mention on a Morrisby Profile.
We seem to have come to believe that there’s not a second to waste in gaining specific industry experience, rather than just doing the usual late shifts at the local 7-Eleven, spending hours scraping the chicken torpedoes’ cheese out of the microwave while dreaming of bigger things.
If, at the end of your degree, you do opt for the life of a podcaster or a dog-walker — knock yourself out. But there’s no shame in pushing back against career counsellors’ obsession with specialisation.
James Panichi is a Melbourne-based journalist with MLex-LexisNexis; he has worked for Politico, the ABC and SBS.
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