Like many single women in their early thirties, Jean Twenge worried that she would miss out on motherhood. Recently divorced, she would be hit by bouts of full-on baby panic. She remembers having conflicting emotions when friends gave birth, casting longing looks at toddlers in the street and anxiously reading a magazine article about the state of her biological clock. The message was loud and clear; time was running out.

Today, at 41 and remarried, she is the mother of three beautiful daughters. “I needn’t have worried after all,” she laughs.

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In other parts of Europe, employers are working with schools and universities on programmes to attract girls into engineering

Sir, The CBI is right to criticise the quality of careers guidance (“MPs call for culture change to engineer better jobs for girls”, June 20), but this is something that schools and colleges cannot do on their own. It’s a problem for employers and education to solve together, and there is no point in expecting the Government to do it for them.

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Teenagers want to be musicians, actors, teachers and police, but have no interest in the fields of hospitality, care, administration and management, where they are far more likely to find work.

A study of 11,000 young people aged 13 to 18 found no link between careers that young people want and the jobs that experts think will exist for them in the future. Acting was the most popular job for 13 and 14-year-olds and still 11th most popular among 17 and 18-year-olds.

Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, (ASCL) said: “Young people of that age group are very easily influenced, for wholly understandable reasons, by the circumstances in which they grow up. Yes, they see celebrity culture and are attracted to those sorts of things. They tend to go for stereotypical ideas of what might be the right career, things that their friends have said. We need really high quality careers advice.”

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Getting an internship or a holiday job while at university makes students three times more likely to get a well-paid job on graduating, a survey found.

Among final-year undergraduates, 36 per cent who had work experience with a leading employer while at university received at least one offer of a graduate-level post. The figure dropped to 11 per cent among third or fourth-year students with no careers-related work experience.

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It is easy to mock reality TV shows such as the X-Factor and The Apprentice, or even to despair that they signal the downfall of Western civilization. But, there are lessons we can all take from such shows to help our careers, claims Scott Simons, a director at recruitment firm Networkers International.

I’ll admit it. I was glued to this year’s Apprentice final and, joined by around six million others; I was clearly in good company. If you haven’t watched the Apprentice or other tv-shows yet, then you are missing out on some great TV. You can check out websites like Likewise to see what is new on television and get your fix and inspiration!

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A part-time job in a supermarket led Andy Clarke to become the CEO of a major British company, he tells Marcus Leroux

He runs a business that serves 19 million customers a week and has annual sales of more than £22 billion.

As a teenager, however, Andy Clarke was more interested in breaching the opposition try line than the upper echelons of management. And the Asda chief executive’s formative years were not spent at Oxford, Cambridge or a prestigious business school.

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