My son is in Year 10 and he’s just been asked to choose his subjects for the next two years.
We’ve read brochures, attended school information meetings and checked out tertiary open days to make sure he’s on the right track. (He’s one of the lucky ones; he actually knows what he wants to do with his life.)
He’s being asked to look ahead—to take the next step based on what he thinks the tenth step will look like.
And I can’t imagine anything more ridiculous. Why?
Because, when I was in Years 11 and 12, I took Secretarial Studies. By the time I left Year 12, I could do shorthand at 100 words a minute. I kicked ass at shorthand.
I never used it again.
When the school asked me to imagine my future, I saw myself sitting in an office in a publishing company with a red pen and a giant pile of paper. (Or running around town with a notepad and tape recorder being Lois Lane. I had a short-lived flirtation with journalism.)
There was a Computer Studies class available but I dismissed it. It was 1990 and computers were for nerds.
I also dismissed Accounting, as I very much doubted I’d go into business—it just wasn’t for me. I was a writer, not an entrepreneur.
Fast forward to 2016…and I spend my days on computers. I’m a communications expert, particularly in web content creation. I’ve created online courses, I’ve run webinars, I’ve built membership websites and I’ve developed social media campaigns. These things just didn’t exist in 1990!
In 1996, I wrote my Honours thesis on the economics of book publishing in Australia, including the future of publishing. I wrote about the exciting possibilities for print-on-demand and announced that this new ‘Internet’ thing might one day enable people to buy scholarly books online.
‘Many academics are connected to the Internet and it is that type of niche area that would attract interested buyers of texts.’
(Thankfully there were people in the world far more clued into the possibilities of the Internet than I was.)
Considering how much has happened to our industry in the last 20 years, it seems almost impossible to tell my son to choose subjects based on his vision of the future. And he’s going to be a games developer—imagine how much that industry will evolve over the next 20 years.
So I’ve told him to check the universities for prerequisites but, otherwise, do whatever makes him happy. It probably won’t matter when he’s gaming with holograms of people from other countries in his lounge room.
Oh, and I now have a Certificate IV in Accounting. It turns out business was for me after all!