The career advice you didn’t get taught at school. It has -at the time of writing- been 13 years since I was at school, and it is only later in life you acknowledge how small a part of life school plays, but at the time it quite literally is your whole world.
While the national curriculum might still be questionable as to how much of it you’ll actually need in the real world, your teachers spend a lot of time trying to prepare you for the world of work and plug in career advice where they can. However, what you are told and what you experience in the workplace and further education can be quite different.
University is not for everyone, and you don’t need to go straight away… if at all
I decided quite early on that I didn’t want to go to university (even though I went later as a mature student). For several years I wanted to pursue my love of art, and I remember watching the news when the fees got first announced and I asked my Dad (whose career spanned extensively in education) if I needed to go to art college and he said no, so I decided there and then it wasn’t an ambition.
When my love of writing overtook my love of art, I still decided that a degree in creative writing was a bit pointless when I could be out in the real world experiencing life to actually write about. I explain why I eventually went to university at 22, here.
The career advice at school for those who didn’t wish to attend university wasn’t there. It was assumed girls would go and work in an office, so anytime there was a university workshop for prospect students, a small group of us were asked to work on our CVs instead.
My experience aside, university is not the be all and end all to life. If you don’t go you can and will, still succeed in your career pursuits. Schools push for you to go (or they certainly did when I was there), because it looks great for them when they can promote how many students of theirs got a place. If you choose to enter further education you need to make sure going is for you and you alone.
Nobody (any more) stays in one job for life
We ‘millennial’s’ and those after us, will never stay in the first professional job we land for life, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. As I discussed in my post about getting into marketing, you can often only really build your experience by working in different places and with different people.
You don’t need to know what you want to do
From what feels like your first day in Year 1 you are asked what you want to be when you grow up, and this never goes away. Career advice suggests if you don’t know what you want to do, you’re unfocused.
But until you actually start working, how can you possibly know what you want to do? It’s also worth adding here that you are never too old to change career direction.
A ‘can-do’ attitude speaks more than academic excellence
All my school reports commended me for being a hard worker, but because I didn’t score high grades all the time, this didn’t translate as likely to have a great career after school.
What a load of shite. A base knowledge is good to get your started, but an eagerness to learn as you go, and a willingness to graft and get stuck in speaks volumes, particularly when you are starting out in your career and will take you a lot further than your A-grade in your maths exam.
What career advice can you share that you weren’t taught at school?
Until next time x
