You can learn a trade rather than just be a labourer… these days just because you learn a trade doesn’t mean you won’t go to college, especially if you want to do something like electrics or plumbing as you have to study for safety certificates. Often your employer will pay for you to go on day release. Bear in mind there are gonna be loads of people wanting solar energy and efficient houses as energy costs go through the roof…

A lot of my younger friends are working as apprentices in this manner. OK the pay isn’t great but better than £9000 debt per year from uni, especially as even if you have a degree its not guaranteed now you have a high paying job..

And you can still go to uni when you are older, people older than me sometimes start at uni after years of working….

Not for the trades as they usually take people in at 16+ and employers often consider youths with academic A-levels overqualified!

TBH my A-levels haven’t been worth shit in the long run, and (other than getting access to computers what folk couldn’t afford 20 years ago) nor was the 2 years I spent in uni. I got my job through being self taught and today I see folk with degrees who earn less than me in shitty call centres…

Hi Just another Darren ,
Yep tough one as how at sixteen are you supposed to know what you want to do with your life , who does …….i bet some of us still dont :-O . A year out is not a bad thing although with university positions getting less i’d grab one while you can . You have any idea of what you might like to do ? must be something ? but dont say space man !!!!! lol as you’d be lucky in this country lol . Maybe you should approach local business etc and ask if it be okay to visit for a day or two to get an idea of what they do …..bullshit abit and say that your interested in said job . Im sure most employers might go for it and it shows initiative .

Of course if you knew what job you wanted it might help with what you might pick to do at uni or maybe just pick a subject you like . At least if you go uni by the time you graduate the job market may have improved ….we all hope . However as most have said it’s best to get a trade or a profession under your belt that way hopefully you’ll never be out of a job . Its a big time of your life as its the start of you making your way on your own so …….dont fuck it up :-O…mungo sounding like ya dad lol . Best of luck with it 🙂 lets us know how you get on . Sorry i was not much help !!!

regards
Mungo

It depends what you’re going to want to do long term. If getting a career and financial independence soon is a priority then it’s definitely worth learning a good trade. Uni won’t be a passport to a top job any more, but if you need the intellectual stimulation of learning at a higher level and the chance to learn new perspectives on life, uni can be brilliant. It’s too difficult to really know at that age, a lot of people just default and go to uni coz it’s the done thing and end up with loads of debt and no real advantage. Going down the trades route will set you up nicely in the meantime, but uni does gives you the time to develop a bit more as a person and expose you to new ideas. A psychology thing I was reading the other day about life decisions and personality said to look back at when your where 12 years old, and what were you like then? Did you enjoy learning things at school or struggle?

Decisions you make now don’t have to impact the rest of your life, plenty of people need time to mature before going to uni with a level head. I took two years out after A-Levels before going to uni to let off some steam ad it definitely helped motivate me more when I went.

Just wanted to add, that you say you are 16.
It’s perfectly ok at 16 to not have a friggin clue about what you want to do. Living in sweden opened my eyes big time to doing what you love to do. People here go back to uni or colleges to retrain in careers and skills that they are interested in after working for a bit or having got a qualification in something else and then realising that it didnt suit them.

Don’t box yourself into “I have to be this or that”.
What would you LIKE to be doing in the next 5 years? What realistically do you see yourself doing and enjoying? I guess the subjects you take at high school have to be ones that you need grades in for courses later on. I dont really know as it was a long time ago I was in your shoes.
Does your school have a work/uni course counsellor that you can speak to. Maybe they might be best as they know what is required for different courses later on.

I have yet to meet any 16/17 year olds that at some point thought “what’s the point and fuck it all.”
You’ll work through it 🙂
My swedish man- a couple of years ago retrained as an electrician as here where I live jobs are pretty much nonexsistent. He thought about what he was good at and off he went. His first love is computery stuff but everyone here seems to have masters degrees (education is free here) in that so getting a job is impossible without being over the top qualified.

The worst thing you can do is choose a course because your mates are doing it 🙂

Good luck!

ahh i don’t wanna sound preachy but theres no point in going to college if you’re going to screw it up for sure and not actually try when you need to. a waste of a year or two of your life that you could be spending doing something else, and if you screw it up first time they’ll be more reluctant to let you do it a second time, especially as you’ll be relying on your college to write a statement about you. you’ve chosen a good spread of subjects though by the look of it. if you’re doing the science and the maths, i wouldn’t recommend actually taking them unless you get a A/A* in the subject at GCSE.. although maybe a B if you’re willing to work really hard at it, i can’t stress how hard it gets and how dissimilar the subject is to the gcse. as kiwifruit said, being realistic is the key. i was very unrealistic and i’ve spent the last 8 months really regretting it, i’ve had to have 3-4 hours of extra physics tuition a week for the last 4 months to try and get me back on track and it’s still difficult. what subjects do you take now?

Hmm what can I say? its normal to be tired in the morning …what ever you choose try to see 10 years a head and will you be happy with your choice then. I started work at your age and tried to get back to school(cause the I work I had demanded it..) at the age of 23 witch didnt work out cause i became interested in politics and became an activist 24/7( I did a homer simpson…see there is dog running!), I havent regret it one second, but when you are into going at school and know you want a good education, I think it will be easier to go on studying for while then take some years off and sort out where to go what to do…but whom I am to say this cause I didnt do it, so take it as friendly advise.

Hi SpazHazzard ,
You design and build them , some pilot flies them and when all goes wrong i put them out lol

regards
Mungo

Fuck uni off if you can’t think of any reason to go. I feel sorry for people your age, as it’s pretty much expected of 16-year-olds to do their A-levels and then pick something they’re vaguely interested in and do it at uni, usually ending up in a low to medium paid boring corporate job. It was the same when I was 16 too, but at least tuition fees were only £1000 per year so most of us will pay back the loan within 10 years or so. I think it’s driven by the fact that a school’s success is judged (by parents and govt) by the number of kids they send to universities.

You should have a think about whether you genuinely want to leave education to do something more vocational (although we’re tacitly taught to look down on ‘workers’ and tradesmen you’ll probably end up on more money than most graduates and have greater job-satisfaction), or are just bored of school and lack motivation like most lads your age (in which case, man up and do your a-levels, it’s only 2 years of your life and costs nothing).

The problem is those figures are in the past.

Since then there has been an economic depression – added to which difficulties in protecting intellectual property mean that a lot of value provided by this has also permanently disappeared, as well as a crisis in the financial industry. Globalisation means UK graduates are often competing for work and salaries with even cleverer more hardworking folk from overseas who will do the same job for half the cost – and in our country management of medium size companies is shit so a lot of good talent and ideas never get anywhere and older managers who rose to the top are willing to smash the ladder that the youths would climb in favour of using cheap foreign labour.

A very clever friend of mine who works in a senior engineering role for a large telecoms company mentions that with current UK fees and less opportunities, for many engieering subjects it makes more sense to emigrate to another EU country such as NL or DE or DK (you have to learn their language of course) and attend University there, as this is where the real opportunities for younger folk are.

It will only be about 5 years by the time your age group graduate from uni. Its only the very top graduates in certain subjects – the boring, difficult subjects, not the ones most people find creative or fun – who are now earning more money. In London, many of these graduates are actually from overseas, particularly the Asian nations. Liberal arts graduates now often earn less than those what went nowhere near uni, and will also be saddled with the £27 000 debts! The foreign competition isn’t going to disappear either in the next decade or so, not unless the Internet for science/business collapses (extremely unlikely, even if its more frivolous uses get locked off due to resource constraints).