Who’s giving your career advice, and when did they last look for a job?
Career advice usually starts in high school. For most students, it doesn't come from a careers professional. It comes from a teacher. In the 2024 GENERATION Survey, 69% of Year 12 students said they'd spoken to a teacher about their career plans, compared with 55% who'd spoken to their school's career adviser. That isn't the advisers' fault. More than 80% of Australian schools have one full-time career practitioner or less, and over half work part-time. In one Victorian example, a single adviser on 0.8 FTE was responsible for nearly 900 senior students. The recommended ratio is one adviser for every 450. The advisers themselves are usually well qualified. In Victoria, 97% of dedicated school career practitioners hold career education qualifications. They're just stretched impossibly thin. So students default to whoever is in front of them. I loved my English teacher. But what made them qualified to shape my career?
Starting too early, with too much pressure
To be fair to career advisers, their job is mostly course selection and subject selection: helping students choose the right subjects to get into the right course. That's important work, but it isn't the same as helping a young person work out what they actually want to do. And the process often starts in Year 10. We're asking 15 and 16 year olds to make decisions that shape their careers, before the part of the brain responsible for long-term planning and decision-making has finished developing. That doesn't happen until our mid-twenties. It's also incredibly stressful. Many students feel like one wrong subject choice will ruin their future. Meanwhile, the job market has never had more options, pathways and specialisations than it does right now.
Parents mean well
Then there's family. Parents want the best for their kids, and many of them have been in the job market recently. But they've usually been there from a different position: established in their careers, not trying to get a foot in the door. So the advice can be well meant and out of date. Wear a suit. Dress for the job you want. Make your resume stand out. Call to follow up. At 17, you assume they know. I wouldn't let a dog groomer cut my hair. Good intentions aren't the same as current knowledge.
"I want to work in IT." Okay, doing what?
A student says, "I want to work in IT." A well-meaning adviser says, "Great, do a computer science degree." But IT isn't one job. It's help desk and technical support. It's programming and software development. It's security, and cyber security, which is a field of its own. Each has different entry points, different skills, different study and very different day-to-day work. If the person giving the advice doesn't know the difference, they can't help the student work out which one actually suits them.
Accounting is the same. "I want to be an accountant." Okay, cool. Management accountant? Financial accountant? Audit? Tax? They're different roles with different career paths, and they suit very different people. Then the next questions: where are the jobs right now? What's the end goal, and what does the path there actually look like?
Some goals sound simple and aren't:
"I want to run a hotel." There's no single course that gets you there. Most people who run hotels worked their way up through operations, and that means years on the floor, in front office, in food and beverage. Does the student know that, and are they up for it?
"I want to be a psychologist." It's a long road: years of study, then supervised practice before you're registered. That's worth knowing at 17, not at 21.
"I want to be a vet." It's highly competitive to get in, it's a long degree, and the job is far more than looking after animals. There's the emotional side, the business side and the hours.
"My dad is a lawyer, so I think I want that." Is it the law you want, or the familiarity? Growing up around a career makes it feel known and safe, but seeing a parent come home from work isn't the same as knowing what the job is like day to day. It might be exactly right. It's still worth asking whether it's their dream or yours.
And then there are the newer ones: "I want to be an influencer." "I want to be an entrepreneur." What does that even mean? An entrepreneur of what? Building what, for whom? Influencing about what, and how does it pay the bills while you build an audience? Plenty of people do make a living this way, but it isn't a career path in the traditional sense. It's running a business. A student who wants it needs someone to help them work out what's behind the word. Is it independence, creativity, flexibility, money? There's more than one way to get each of those.
None of these goals is wrong. But a goal without the detail behind it isn't a plan. Good career advice asks the next question, and the one after that, until the student can actually see the path, and decide if it's still the one they want.
The cost shows up later
When the advice misses, the cost doesn't show up straight away. It shows up a year or two later, when students realise they're in the wrong course, or they finish a degree and find themselves stuck at the start of a career they don't want. Around one in seven domestic undergraduate students who started in 2023 didn't come back the following year. Not all of that is down to career advice, but some of it is. Behind that number are young people who aren't okay, and who are now starting again.
And at university?
You'd hope this is where the gap closes. In my experience, it often doesn't. Many people in university careers teams have never worked in recruitment. They've never run a hiring process, written a position description, built an interview matrix, run an assessment centre, presented a shortlist or debriefed a hiring manager. They're teaching students how to get through a process they haven't been on the other side of. Careers teams also have KPIs. But what do those KPIs measure? Workshop attendance and resumes reviewed, or students hired and still in the job a year later? Those aren't the same thing.
The noise doesn't help
Then there's everything students hear from the wider world. "Don't go into IT, AI will take over." "Accounting is dead." "Why would you teach? They're all overworked." Industries change, and some of the change is real. But change creates opportunity too. In September, CA ANZ and Oxford Economics projected a shortage of around 18,000 accounting, audit and finance professionals in Australia by 2035. Accounting isn't dead. It's short of people.
"I just want to make money"
Something I hear a lot is "I just want to make money", and not much beyond that. With the cost of living where it is, I understand it completely. Money matters, and wanting financial security is reasonable. But "make money" isn't a direction on its own. It doesn't tell you what you'll be doing for eight hours a day, five days a week. That's often why people change course a few years in: the salary was there, but the work wasn't right.
Not everyone is meant for uni, and that's fine
Not everyone is right for university or higher education, and that should be said more often. Trades, apprenticeships, traineeships, going straight into work, starting a business: these are real paths, and plenty of people build excellent careers on them. But not going to uni doesn't mean you don't need guidance. Those students aren't going to go and live in a cave somewhere. They still need to find work, build a career and make good decisions about their future. Too often, the support is built around one path. Students who aren't on it get less help, when they may need more.
So what do you actually do?
Check who you're taking advice from. How recently were they in the job market, and in what position?
Talk to people who actually do the job. Not people who know someone who does it.
Ask a recruiter. We see what employers are hiring for, what they're paying and what they're looking for, every day.
Be suspicious of sweeping statements about whole industries. "X is dead" is rarely true.
Ask the next question. If someone tells you what to do, ask why, and what it actually looks like day to day.
Good intentions don't replace current knowledge of how hiring works. Too many young people are making some of the biggest decisions of their lives on advice that's well meant but out of date. That gap is exactly why I built Job Market Mastery.
Sources: GENERATION Survey Wave 3 (2024), generationsurvey.org.au; McCrindle and CICA, The Role of Career Practitioners in Our Schools (2015); Career Education Association of Victoria (2021); ACSES retention rates, 2026 update; CA ANZ and Oxford Economics (September 2026).