When they ask
When a younger man asks you what to do.
Your son, your nephew, the new starter. He wants an answer, and the one you were given no longer works.
The map you were given has gone
Most men over forty were handed a simple route: choose a field, get the qualification, climb. It worked well enough that it is the first thing out of our mouths when a young man asks.
SI (super intelligence) is changing which work exists faster than any of us can map. Advice built on the old route sounds confident and may be wrong. The honest starting point is to say so.
What James saw last in hiring
This is James's experience from nearly twenty years of recruiting, not a careers service. By the end, the people who did best were rarely the ones with the neatest progression.
They had life experience. They had humour. They were content, or close to it. They could apply all of that with real people, and they understood the community around them. They were the same person wherever they were, so they never needed to act. None of that comes from a course, and all of it can be started at eighteen.
Ask before you answer
When a young man asks what to do, he often means something else: am I behind, is it all right that I do not know, will I be all right. Find out which question it is before you reach for a job title.
Ask what he enjoys when nobody is grading him. Ask who he admires and why. Ask what he would do if money were not the reason. You will learn more in those three answers than in any list of careers.
What you can honestly say
That not knowing at his age is normal, and now it is normal at yours too. That the skills that last are the ones a machine cannot carry: judgement, trust, the welcome, being somebody people want in the room. That his body is part of his career, because the work that remains will reward the people who can still show up well at sixty.
And that he can change direction more than once. You probably have.
What you do not need to do
You do not need to have the answer, and you do not need to pretend. A man who says plainly what he does not know, and stays in the conversation anyway, is more use than one who hands over a plan from a world that has moved on.
If you want to think through what you will say first, the guide on this site will help you put it into words.