Flutterby™! : Career counseling

Just got back from 4 hours helping an acquaintance. I'd figured on maybe 2. She's someone I've met at various North Bay Multimedia Association shindigs, has various physical disabilities, and is trying hard to find a career path that'll let her make a living and no longer be supported by the state.

I went over to help her set up an Avid non-linear editor. Various dedicated hardware boxes, a shiny Betacam SP deck, googobs of thick cables with those beefy industrial connectors. No wussy USB folded metal USB connectors here, even for the composite video and the audio stuff there's not an RCA jack on that rack.

And yet, all the folks I know who are doing video editing professionally are working on laptops with Firewire jacks.

I just went to help her get the system running, provide a little focus, give her some direction for her next steps, but although I try to be up-beat and as "cheerleader" as possible, I'm more than a little concerned for her future. I mean, it's great that she's got $20k worth of cool hardware in her apartment so that she can undertake learning a new profession, but because nobody who really knew was guiding the purchasing she needs a bunch more stuff to make it useful, a year from now that stuff will be worth $5k, and I'm not sure she'll have learned what she really needs to survive.

Instead, if we had the social structures where she could have some contact with professionals, where the career counseling was more than "and you should add some web design skills to that mix", where it was more than my lone voice screaming "editing is not about the technology", and maybe she got set up with an $800 computer with a $100 capture card and an old video camera to learn what directions she needed to go after this, I think she'd come out of the next year with quite a bit better chance of actually making a go of it in the real world.

Does anyone have insight into how the social services of this matter work? Anyone know how we can get professionals involved in mentoring more? I mean, I'm looking at the time I'm going to spend this week helping adults with career advice and thinking "no wonder I'm such a conservative asshole, I feel like I'm already giving 20% of my life to things that the state claims to be doing before we even get into the contributions of taxes."

So how do we undertake to do this better?