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.

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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.

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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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