How to Tell Good Careers Advice From Bad

In one week you can be told, with complete confidence, that law is finished, that law is the safest thing you can study, that nobody needs a degree any more, and that you should learn to code.

None of these people are lying. Each is describing a small piece of the world, from a particular year, and none of them tells you which piece.

You cannot fix that by finding the one person who is right. You fix it by getting better at spotting which advice has something behind it.

Three questions that do most of the work

Whoever is talking, ask:

How do you know that? A person with real information answers this easily. "I hired for that role last year." "I did that programme." "My sister did it and here is what she said." Someone repeating a rumour will change the subject.

When was that true? Fields move. Entry requirements move. A description of what a job was like in 2012 might still be right, but you should know that is what you are holding.

What would change your mind? This one is uncomfortable and it is the most useful. Anyone who cannot name a single thing that would change their view is not giving you information about the world.

Ask all three out loud, politely, without arguing. You are not trying to win.

What good advice sounds like

• It is specific. "The first two years were mostly statistics and I nearly failed it. The people who did well had done a lot of maths."
• It is dated. "When I applied in 2021." "The last time I hired, in March."
• It admits its limits. "That was my department. I do not know if it is like that everywhere."
• It describes the entry, not the peak. Advice about being a senior surgeon is not advice about being a medical student. The first three years are the part you have to survive.
• It names a cost. Every route has one: years, money, exams, unsociable hours, a slow start, moving away from home. Advice with no downside in it has not been thought about properly.
• It ends in something you can do this week. Look at that page. Speak to that person. Try that thing.

What weak advice sounds like

• Certainty with no detail. Confidence is free, and it is not evidence.
• It is about them. "I always wish I had done architecture." That is a regret. It is not a recommendation about you.
• Status first. "It looks good." Looks good to whom, for how long, and what does it cost you to keep it looking good?
• One person treated as a rule. "My cousin did it and it worked out." One person is one route, from one year, with one set of circumstances.
• Numbers with no source and no year. Salary claims are the worst offenders. If nobody can say where a figure came from and when, take it out of the decision entirely rather than discounting it slightly.
• "There will always be a need for X." Sometimes true, and it still tells you nothing about how many people are needed, where, at what pay, or how hard it is to get in.
• It arrives with something to sell. A course, a service, a referral. That does not make it wrong. It means you check it somewhere else before you act on it.

The one-person problem

Most careers advice you will get comes from someone who did the thing once. They know one route, from one year, in one place, with one set of advantages and obstacles. That is real knowledge. It is not general knowledge.

The fix is not to distrust them. It is to collect three of them, and make sure one entered the field recently, in the last two or three years.

Then look at where they disagree. That is the interesting part, because it usually marks the bit that depends on circumstances rather than the bit that is fixed.

The question almost nobody asks

Ask what happened to the people who did not make it.

Of the students who started that programme alongside them, how many finished? Of the ones who finished, how many are doing the job the course is named after? What are the rest doing instead, and did the course leave them anywhere useful?

People answer this question honestly far more often than you would expect, and it is the single most informative thing you can ask about a competitive route. Advice usually comes from the survivors, because they are the ones still in the field and still talking about it. The people it did not work out for are not in the room.

You are not trying to be discouraged. You are trying to find out what the route looks like if you turn out to be ordinary at it, which is a real possibility for everyone.

Advice from the internet

Videos and posts are made to be watched and shared, and that rewards the strongest claim rather than the most accurate one. "Do not study X" travels further than "X is fine for some people, depending on which entry route you take."

Before you act on something you saw online, ask what the person gains if you believe it.

Then treat it as a lead, not a conclusion. Pull the specific factual claim out of it and check that claim against an entry requirements page, a set of job listings, or a person who works in the field. Some of them survive the check. The rest were never claims, just a tone of voice.

When two people you trust disagree

Write both claims down, as plainly as you can. Then find the checkable part inside each one.

"There are no jobs in that field" contains something you can check. Search for the entry-level job title. How many listings are there in a place you could actually live, and what do they ask for?

"Accounting is safe" contains something too. What do accounting graduates from institutions near you do first, and how long does qualifying take?

Check the one you can check. Most disagreements shrink once you look at a specific claim instead of two opinions.

Sometimes both people are right about different things. One is describing what pays. The other is describing what you can bear to do for forty hours a week. Those are both real, and you are the only person who can weigh one against the other.

The cheapest test there is

Ask anyone in a job you are curious about to walk you through last Tuesday. Not their career. Tuesday.

What did they do first? How much of the day was writing, talking, sitting in meetings, waiting, working alone? What was the most annoying part? Who did they have to persuade?

This is hard to fake and it tells you more than any list of advantages and disadvantages. Jobs that sound different often turn out to be the same daily work in different rooms. Jobs that sound identical often are not.

Then run a small experiment before you commit to anything large: a short course, a club, a volunteering shift, one project finished rather than started. A week of the actual work settles arguments that a year of thinking about it will not.

Advice from people who love you

Family advice deserves its own note. It is usually the best intentioned and the hardest to push back on.

Relatives often hold information that is real but old, and worry that is real and current. The useful move is to separate the two. "You will never find work" is a fear. "Graduates of that programme mostly do not find work in the first year" is a claim, and you can go and look.

Bringing back something you checked works better than arguing. Show the entry requirements. Show the listings. Show what someone who entered the field last year actually said. You are not trying to prove anyone wrong. You are trying to get everyone reading the same page.

Where a mentor fits

A mentor is not automatically right either, and the three questions apply to them exactly as they apply to your uncle. What a mentor offers is someone currently inside a field who has no stake in what you choose.

A reasonable way to use one:

• Ask a Mentor for a single specific question, such as what a first-year person in that role actually does.
• A group session when you want the shape of a field and do not yet know what to ask.
• One to one when you have a real decision in front of you with a date attached.

Mentoring on eStudent360 is free for students, every mentor is verified before being matched, conversations stay on the platform, and students under 18 need a guardian's approval before it starts.

What you are actually building

Not certainty. Nobody has that, including the confident ones.

What you want is a short list of claims you have checked yourself, in your own words, with dates on them. Ten lines in a notebook is enough.

Then, when someone tells you the opposite next week with total conviction, you will know exactly which part of it you can go and test.