The Associated Press is reporting on the news from this month's annual conference of the National Career Development Association in Boston that the nation's career counselors are abandoning their five-year campaign to steer America's best and brightest young job seekers into careers re-writing the woefully outdated book on which skills, abilities, values, and personal traits and proclivities go with which vocations.
"Oh my god," said Nate Armstrong, career career coach with 25 years in the field, "I have no idea why any of us are bothering at this point. About the only skill I'm bringing to the table myself these days is an outstanding aptitude for pulling all kinds of bad advice out of my ass.
"I don't know what happens to this industry now that we've failed to steer the right people into a career in completely re-doing the job key that goes with assessment tool standards like the Values and Preferences Exercise and the Transferable Skills Worksheet. We're all this close to career coaching ourselves to take the transferable skill of just making stuff up with us into the field of Economics or maybe the school reform movement.
Said Margaret Thill, headhunter for the Establishment Journalism industry, "Who the hell coached these career coaches into careers in career coaching? How do you look at a guy with a dynamic aptitude for growing moss on his back and not launch him into an exciting career as a fossil regardless of how overqualified he might be.
"These Mr. and Ms. Van Winkles keep waking up just in time to send us another service-oriented, principles-ridden truth-teller who flames out in about ten minutes, five and a half if it's a day when another story comes up that would blatantly expose this democracy as the sham it's become if it weren't reported on properly.
"Memo to the Museum of Vocational Guidance Advisors: The boat left a long time ago and you guys missed it. Establishment newsrooms are obviously only hiring ambitious scruples-free ass-kissers with egos nonetheless equal to or bigger than those of the big shots whose fat asses they're kissing. You can start steering all the world savers toward careers in homelessness."
Said US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, "I'm not sure how America starts meeting the challenges of the 21st century if our schools don't start mass producing career guidance professionals who can place people at the head of the nation's classrooms who can mass produce career guidance professionals who can channel the nation's employment seekers into the jobs they're made for in a rapidly changing labor market.
"What nobody ever mentions in all the talk about America's crumbling infrastructure is the dire need to modernize the bridges between the right workers and the right work. What we have now in education, for instance, is a situation where far too many union enthusiasts way overqualified in the nurturing arts are leaving all kinds of children behind in the Race to the Top.
"America would have been much better served had all these workers currently racing their own former students to the top of the pension and benefits heap been steered into careers perhaps in over-coddling workers as state-mandated psychological wellness professionals in the real world's HR departments. They could even have helped themselves and each other get over their painful misconception that they do not have to work summers like everybody else.
"And with a little vocational rehabilitation, the unemployed, union-burned workers from America's decimated manufacturing sector could easily step in and implement the standardized, high stakes test preparation and delivery system that the current teaching corps is having so much trouble with."
In related news, a routine quality control inspection of the nation's career development industry has confirmed its dismal performance in most sectors but has found that the industry continues to do a remarkably good job of guiding the nation's greediest, meanest, most dishonest and self-important citizens into the fields of finance and politics.
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