It's rare that I agree with Michael Gove on anything, and not just because he's tried the Atkins diet. From his love of Mumford & Sons to his holiday souvenir choice of swimming trunks in the style of lederhosen to his belief that we should all be texting each other love poems instead of sexy talk, suffice to say I see myself as his polar opposite. Except on one point: careers advisers. Govey's refusal to let them back into schools to unleash their lacklustre CV-building tips on the younger generation can only be applauded. Not once has a careers adviser given me a single snippet of useful information, but plenty of people in my chosen profession have, and, as Gove says, they're the ones who should be giving the advice. He calls them business leaders, but I call them simply: people who know what they're on about. Careers advisers, meanwhile, don't. Sorry.

Take that little profile bit they tell you that you need at the top of your CV, for example. Every school CV workshop I ever had, whether part of some tedious careers advice seminar or this horrific programme introduced in 2000 called "Key Skills", which rebranded maths as something called "application of number" and English as "communication", suggested that you begin your CV with a paragraph in which you describe yourself. So for years, I'd been doling out this trite document that contained meretricious sentences such as: "I am an enthusiastic and motivated individual." Not quite as bad as that girl on Twitter who had "likes wanking" surreptitiously added to hers, but not great either. It wasn't until an editor at Vogue asked to see it before returning it marked with a red pen and handing me a template she'd made herself that I realised: a CV needn't contain prose at all, especially not self-satisfied prose. Thanks, careers advisers.

Perhaps it's different outside of the state system, but careers advisers were never especially good at fostering grand ambitions among the student body, either. Around age 15, we were made to sit a multiple choice test which supposedly then informed you of your career destiny. Disappointingly, it didn't seem to have especially high hopes for most of the people in my year. Even those with the most potential were designated low-skilled work. From the results, you'd have expected us to have turned out to be a cohort of school caretakers and fish farmers (a popular result, I'm told). There were several future undertakers, while a friend of mine was branded a budding "lorry driver's assistant", but no sports car designers, doctors, or scientists (some of my ex-classmates' current jobs). Not that there's anything wrong with any of these careers (indeed, we suspected that the results may have been rigged due to a shortage of fish farmers that year), it's just that, much like when you go to the Jobcentre, there didn't seem to be much attention paid to graduate jobs. We just weren't expected to be graduates.

I've learned that the best people to help you in your chosen career are people within that career, especially if you're a minority, which as a woman in a male-dominated workplace you might well be. Encouraging people working across a variety of professions to go and inspire the next generation of school-leavers by talking to them, mentoring them, and setting up professional networks is what we should be doing. In the end, talking to a careers adviser can be useful, but only if you want to grow up to be a careers adviser. It's not something I would recommend. There's not that many jobs going.