I don’t know what a high school guidance counsellor’s job looks like these days, at least on the career-advice side. But I’d have to think it involves a certain amount of throwing up of hands and answering kids’ questions with a “You tell me.”

Back when I was in high school (yes, yes, back when I rode to school on a coal-fueled barge and the skies were black with passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers), careers had well-defined paths that were expected to take you through your working life. That’s not quite how it worked out for my graduating class; our career paths forked, spiralled and went downright fractal on us.

Maybe we should give up on trying to predict the precise career options that will face today’s crop of fresh faces, and ask instead what skills will make the most sense in a socially networked world. (“Extracting surgically-implanted RFID tags” sounds like a winner right out of the gate.) Conversational authenticity, exercising sound judgement in deciding what to share and with whom, acting online and offline with intention and integrity – these all strike me as pretty critical, not to mention being building blocks for just being decent people.