What do I want to do?

Now you have finished, or are thinking about finishing school you have got to decide what you want to do next. Now you are an adult you can, in theory, do anything you want but some kind of plan would be a good idea. There are two ways of deciding what you want to do next both are shown below.

Bypass this lot if you are interested in going to university (you can change your mind later)

Jump to:
My options - deciding what to do based on your skills and achievements
My ideas - deciding what to do based on your interests
I'm still stuck - what to do if you still don't know where to go next

My options:
Though I said above you can do anything, to make things easier the main choices can be split into four choices:

Work - Getting a job straight away and stopping education
School - Staying on at school or college for another year
Job training - Getting a vocational education or qualifications based at college or work
University - Continuing academic education at university of college

You may be thinking that a gap year is missing from these options - seeing as a gap year (or years if its longer) is only a short amount of time unless you are very rich you will need to choose what to do afterwards! Gap years are discussed later.

Your decision with which option you pick will depend largely on your results and abilities up till now. If your A-levels are largely good (above C/D) you are likely to achieve the grades needed to get into university. Remember if you have good results you don't necessarily have to go to university - you may find one of the other options suits you better.

If your results are not so good but you feel you can do better you might want to stay at school and retake the year. This may be needed if you missed good results on the core subjects at GCSE (English, maths, science, IT), you think you need another subject to do what you want or you just underperformed in one subject or another.

If you have a particular career in mind, are sick of school but don't want to start working or just feel some extra skills in a chosen subject would help you get a job later you may want to consider job training. This will be some sort of placement when you study for a qualification and work for a company at the same time getting the benefit of real-work experience and getting paid for it too. This may be a good idea if your results aren't so good but you feel you have skills in certain subjects which you would like to continue with.

If you are really sick of education but have certain interests or skills you may want to go straight into working. Lots of companies have training programs which will help you advance and give you experience without having to do extra learning, you will also earn money straight away.

If you feel none of these options really suit you have a look at the my ideas section below or just flick through a few career leaflets at your library to give yourself ideas.

I want to know more about:
Work
School
Job training
University

My ideas:
You may not have any idea where you want to go next but hopefully you have some ideas of what you would like to do. You don't need to know exactly - just have a general idea of what subjects interest you. These don't need to be subjects you study at school, they can really be anything.

If you really have no idea you might want to start a list of all the subjects at school and activities outside of it which you enjoy doing. Hopefully you will be good at them as well but that is not the most important thing.

Once you have decided what you might like to do you need to decide how you're going to go about doing it. This means looking at the section above and deciding what's the best way to get your chosen career. If it requires qualifications university is probably the best option, if it is experience you need then you might want to look at job training. If you can see no other way of getting into that industry maybe getting a job and working your way up is a good way to go.

The important thing is to talk to people - your friends, your parents, your teachers also look at websites and companies in the fields you are interested in. All the research you do will give you a better idea of exactly what you might want to do ant will come in useful if you decide to pursue that career or decide to study a related subject.

What if I'm interested in more than one subject?

I'm still stuck
Just from looking at all this you still may not have a clear idea of what you want to do. This site mainly caters for those interested in going to university so if you think your possibly interested in that continue to the university section to find out if you are still interested. It doesn't matter too much if you think you are studying the wrong thing for your chosen career - most (with the exception of medicine, nursing, law and a few others) don't need you to have a degree in your chosen field so you may find that your job prospects are not affected by studying a certain course. Remember there is no point in going to university if you don't enjoy it and the subject you are studying - so choose carefully.

Still having trouble then why not email me.