It’s not just our friends. Katie, also 36, from Manchester, had been working as a brand strategist and designer for nearly five years when her father-in-law asked her: “What do you actually do?”

“I found it amusing and wasn’t offended at all,” she shares. “Nor was I surprised. He only asked because someone else had enquired and he didn’t know the answer. But even now, I’m not entirely sure he understands what my title means.”

“There’s nothing wrong with not knowing exactly what your friend does for a living,” reassures Robbie Bryant, careers expert at Open Study College. “We spend a lot of time at work but it doesn’t necessarily shape our personality or interests. Often people can fall into a job rather than it being a true passion. Friends, more often than not, connect on a personal level.”

Bryant goes on to explain that people can also be quite modest when it comes to their careers. “Generally speaking, nobody wants to boast about their job, especially during harder times like the current cost of living crisis,” he says. “Plus, when we’re out meeting up with friends we simply want to escape from the working week so we don’t tend to mention our work in extreme detail.” As he puts it, this doesn’t come down to whether we like our jobs or not, it’s that we crave new conversations.

Why it’s OK to have no idea what your friends do for work