Can we start with a thought experiment? 

Think of a formative time in your adolescence where someone is badgering you about what you’re going to do with your life. Maybe a parent. A teacher. Creepy Uncle Dave at a family gathering. Either way, indulge me for a minute and remember how you would have answered it. 

In the Nelson timeline it’s spring 1997. Dunfermline Athletic are doing surprisingly well on their return to the Scottish Premiership. The album charts are filled with absolute bangers, Daft Punk, Kula Shaker and Alanis Morissette, all on heavy Sony Walkman rotation as I pedal my mean-streets-of-Townhill paper round. (Although if you’re misremembering this as some kind of halcyon period for music, let the record state that Robson & Jerome had two albums in the charts. But this is my Update, not Mark Locke’s.) 

Our scene for the day is a classroom in Queen Anne High School (QAHS). The subject is Guidance, a smorgasbord of topics designed to prepare us for the wider world. Interpersonal skills, bullying, sex education, substance abuse et al. Taught by someone removed from their core discipline and doing this instead, presumably in some sort of disciplinary rehabilitation programme. 

The teacher, who for the purposes of this we’ll call Ms Miller (chiefly because her name was Ms Miller), announces that today’s guidance topic is future careers. She kicks off by going round the class, one by one, asking what we want to do with our lives when we become QAHS alumni. 

Oh no. 

I have nothing. As we work our way round the desks, I quickly figure out I’m going to be close to last (I’m smart like that; I know my clockwise). This is either good, because I have around seven minutes to think of something to say (a skill I’d later refine for webinars), or bad, because I have seven minutes of acute anxiety to navigate. 

It is the latter. 

The worst part? Other people have actual answers. Alan wants to work in engineering. High-school-silent-agonising-crush Linsey wants to be a PE teacher. Lesley-Ann wants to be an athlete. Then it’s me. The whole world looks on… 

“Well, I’d quite like to do a relatively undirected degree because I want to buy myself some time. Then I’ll live in Edinburgh and work at one of the major lifecos to develop my skills, make some connections and get some qualifications. When the time is right, I’ll jump to a start-up. We’ll work our arses off, fuelled by adrenaline, building it until it becomes mainstream. I’ll then spend my time writing white papers and very moderately entertaining Updates on a Wednesday morning.” 

Standing ovation. Hollywood kiss with Linsey. Roll the credits. 

Of course this is ferocious, LinkedIn-grade horseshit. 

The actual answer? 

“Mumble mumble… maybe something with computers… mumble mumble.” 

And that, in truth, is the point. 

Some people, even at 16 or 17, have a fairly clear idea of where they want to go. Others absolutely do not. Most of us sit somewhere in the messy middle, vaguely interested in a few things, quietly anxious about all of them, and largely making it up as we go along. 

Looking back, what’s striking isn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, it’s how little help there was in giving shape to the options. Guidance class covered plenty of important ground, but careers largely boiled down to a handful of familiar professions and a tacit assumption that the rest would kind of sort itself out. 

Which is where financial education (and visibility of careers in financial planning) might have fitted rather neatly. Not as “this is what you must do”, but as “this exists, and here’s roughly what it looks like”. 

The problem, as our New Blood research (new paper klaxon) shows, is that for most young people it still doesn’t exist at all. When we asked 17–23-year-olds about careers, very few mentioned finance unprompted. Only 28% find financial services appealing, and just 21% see financial planner as an attractive career. You can make an argument that those numbers are actually higher than they might be given the barriers involved, but the core point is that they’re lower than almost any other career or sector mentioned. 

That invisibility starts early. Only 17% of young people told us they’d received good financial education at school, yet 86% think it should be taught. If money itself is barely covered, it’s no surprise the professions built around helping people with it are even further from view. 

So what chance does financial planning really have if it’s missing from classrooms, careers conversations, and cultural shorthand? If the only reference points are suits, spreadsheets and “probably like an accountant”, then of course it never makes it into the mumble-mumble phase of someone’s thinking. 

That’s what New Blood, both our latest paper and our series of events, is really about. Not forcing clarity on people who aren’t ready for it, but widening the picture early enough that financial planning can at least be seen as an option. 

I wonder what would have happened if, back in that QAHS classroom in 1997, someone had said: “There’s a job where you help people make sense of their lives through money. You don’t need to be a maths prodigy. You do need to be curious, empathetic, and willing to listen.” 

Would I still have mumbled something about computers? 

Almost certainly. 

But at least I’d have known it existed.

For the music this week I have to pick the heaviest-rotation paper round album. Here’s a version of Govinda by Kula Shaker from a month ago. Close your eyes and reach a higher state of spiritual consciousness while I reminisce about delivering Daily Records to pensioners. Turns out they’re playing Glasgow next month. Anyone fancy it?