Should I have become a fish farmer? That is what a computer-generated aptitude test once told me was my life's calling at the age of 16. And I am far from alone. Fashion designer Henry Holland was advised to become a fishmonger, and Baroness Patricia Scotland QC was told by her careers adviser that the best she could hope for was to become a supervisor at Sainsbury's.
But bad careers advice has only become more common, according to politicians. A committee of MPs has complained that the government's decision to make schools, and not local authorities, responsible for careers guidance was a serious mistake, and one that has led to a worsening of the advice available.
What is hard to know is how much worse it can be. Interviews with successful people are littered with stories of those who were sent down wrong roads by misguided "help" – from poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who was told by her father to get a "proper" job, to Nobel prize-winner Sir John Gurdon, who was told by teachers he was "too stupid" to study science. Then there is Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, who was told she was "suited to a job answering telephones".
And that's not to mention the friends and colleagues whose dreams were crushed by advisers keen to get them to "lower their expectations" – something common enough to be perfectly sartirised by Monty Python in their famed lion-tamer sketch.
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Only Bart Simpson would be happy to be informed that his likely future occupation would be as "a drifter".
But perhaps that's because the stories that stick in our minds are when people try to thwart our dreams – and the sensible suggestions are just quietly acted on? Which just leaves one puzzling thought: with all that inappropriate advice flying around, why is no one ever told to become a careers adviser?
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What advice were you given at school? And did you follow it?
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