i need help on decision making

[pee dubya]

Good advice on here, the only right decision is what you feel in your gut is the right choice.

A few things to consider though, right now, for graduates, hardly any jobs around, when you graduate it might be different, might not be.

You can go to Uni at any age, doesn't have to be straight out of school.

It wouldn't hurt to work for a couple of years, save money, then go to Uni, and you'd come out with far less debt than most people, also you'd maybe appreciate what you gain from it more than people who go straight there. It wouldn't matter at all if you were a couple of years older than most people, at least in my degree there's a whole range of ages.

If you work for a couple of years, and find it shite, then do a degree in something you really enjoy, you might appreciate it more, but you might also take it mroe seriously than other people and get better grades, and you'd have full time work experience, that would make you mRoe employable when you graduate so you could be mroe likely to get your dream job.

You could get comfy in your current job and settle down for a lifetime of tedium and mediocrity, and spend your days wishing you'd had those few years of innocent fun before you settled down to the hard slog of real life.

Depends on what you want.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Only you can make the decision but I'd actually play devil's advocate to Damocles. First of all, how do you feel about doing A-Levels and then Uni? Do you feel you can do them justice? I'm very dubious about some of the kids going to Uni these days - They get three years of a great social life but come out with a so-so degree, thousands of pounds in debt and little chance of a decent job.

I too work in IT and experience is valued far higher than qualifications. There are five of us freelancers working together and I'm the only one with a degree. Actually not true - another has an Open University degree. Another started as a 16yr old at BT and another in the old YTS scheme. All of these guys earn close to (or maybe even into) six figures. By the time you would have come out of uni, you could have 5 or 6 years experience under your belt. Once you've got that, no one will give a hoot if you don't have a degree unless you want to work for one of the big consultancies. IT skills are eminently transferable so, with the right ones, you could work for any company, engineering, financial services, retail, etc. Plus you could travel.

Another factor is that, even if you decide to go into IT once you have your degree, a lot of the work that graduates would once have done is being done offshore, in India or other places. So it could be harder to pick up something, plus you are competing against thousands of others, with little to tell you apart from them.

Uni might help you in some soft skills but working will teach you far more about the real skills you need in the world like responsibility, task and time management and the ability to work with people. Get some advice from whoever - the Careers Service, your school or the National Apprenticeship Service - and if it's al buttoned down tight then you could be doing yourself a favour.

 

[Paylor_Shade_Of_Blue]

Both sides of the coin are represented well here with a lot of good advice. All i'm gonna say is that uni was the best time of my life, it was my last chance to party before becoming an 'adult', now i have responsibilities and commitments. God i wish i could go back!

 

[ELH18-MCFC]

Stay there, go to college in the evenings.

 

[Swordfish7]

Read "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki then read it again then decide.

 

[Bluemoon115]

I think you've got to ask people around you why no-one else wants the job before you make any decisions.

 

[MCFCinUSA]

ok, here's my tuppence worth:-

- I'm a graduate with a degree from a top-ranked UK business school, but what I did (including working overseas and spending a few years as a professional gambler) had very little to do with my academic qualifications, although they helped. Other people with the same degree as me went on to head up Tesco's, and there are a whole bunch of distinguished alumni.

now what you do has nothing to do with the above, but what objectives you have and what sort of life you wish to lead and what's important to YOU.

- I wouldn't knock university on the head because you're thinking you'll graduate and be unemployed; that's a red herring and a very weak way of looking at things. In fact, that is 'fear' coming through, and you shouldn't be making decisions based on anything like this. I don't want to go all 'zen' on you here, but fear is really an illusion.

what you decide to do should be based on what makes you happy.

- if the company you're working for is strong, and you enjoy what you're doing, and they really might offer you a future that is appealing, then as people have advised, staying put might be an option to seriously consider. You may MAKE further education a PART of the terms of your employment, and NEGOTIATE a package with them accordingly. If they're serious about you and your future, I'm certain they'll be only too happy to consider such a request from you.

- if you enjoy studying, if you have a zest for knowledge and a burning desire with a subject or university in mind (as some do) then focus on this and go for it. As people have already said, university life gives you a lot more than just 'book smarts', although again as with most things, you get out of it what you put in.

in my case, I'd never have ended up in the USA (or working overseas in Europe and Asia) or doing what I'm doing now, if it weren't for my degree but also the ancillary opportunities being a student opened up for me, including getting American working papers. That said, I wasn't around to see Kinkladze pull on a City shirt.

weigh it all up... make your decision.

there is no right or wrong answer....

life is a journey - and it is always better to travel than to arrive.

make your decision based on the entire mix of everything available to you, and what you value most, with an eye on your future and not just the immediate short-term, and especially from strength and not from weakness.

you'll make the best choice I'm sure.

 

[Damocles]

Only you can make the decision but I'd actually play devil's advocate to Damocles. First of all, how do you feel about doing A-Levels and then Uni? Do you feel you can do them justice? I'm very dubious about some of the kids going to Uni these days - They get three years of a great social life but come out with a so-so degree, thousands of pounds in debt and little chance of a decent job.

I too work in IT and experience is valued far higher than qualifications. There are five of us freelancers working together and I'm the only one with a degree. Actually not true - another has an Open University degree. Another started as a 16yr old at BT and another in the old YTS scheme. All of these guys earn close to (or maybe even into) six figures. By the time you would have come out of uni, you could have 5 or 6 years experience under your belt. Once you've got that, no one will give a hoot if you don't have a degree unless you want to work for one of the big consultancies. IT skills are eminently transferable so, with the right ones, you could work for any company, engineering, financial services, retail, etc. Plus you could travel.

Another factor is that, even if you decide to go into IT once you have your degree, a lot of the work that graduates would once have done is being done offshore, in India or other places. So it could be harder to pick up something, plus you are competing against thousands of others, with little to tell you apart from them.

Uni might help you in some soft skills but working will teach you far more about the real skills you need in the world like responsibility, task and time management and the ability to work with people. Get some advice from whoever - the Careers Service, your school or the National Apprenticeship Service - and if it's al buttoned down tight then you could be doing yourself a favour.

That's also true. University has to be a personal choice.

If you are going to Uni because you think you should, don't. You will be disillusioned, and barely scrape through or drop out. My dissertation was all about the problems of introductory programming students, so I have a little bit of knowledge on the statistics, and motivations.

Some nice hard stats for you:
On a Computer Science or Software Engineering degree type, the dropout rate is one in three.
Of the students who achieved a 2:1 or above, 84% of them admitted to having a strong prior interest in IT, with nearly 58% of these been programmers.

The general rule for employability in IT, is that the closer to Business subjects your degree is (and the further away from pure Maths), the less of a market. This comes from someone whose degree is in Computer Systems Engineering, which is one between the Project Management/Object Oriented Programming aspects of a good Software Engineering degree and the Data Structures and Algorithms/Adaptive Intelligence aspects of a Computer Science degree.

SE grads generally are seen as people who don't know enough about the internal workings of the machine and cannot design algorithms.
CS grads generally are seen as people who can design algorithms all day long, but cannot actually program.

CS is heavily titled towards maths, if you don't know what this is:

Then look a bit lower down the chain, towards the SE side of things.

All this is dependent on you wanting to be a developer, as I find that most IT degree students go that way. IT Systems Administration (which is basically what an IT Manager is) is incredibly boring, and tiresome. IT guys tend to be the creative type, and this type of work has stifled many a graduate. If you have a Computer Science degree though, you can work anywhere from NASA to Tesco.

You should sign up to <a class="postlink" href="http://prospects.ac.uk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://prospects.ac.uk</a> and look around a bit as it will answer questions that you are having.
Oh, and nearly ALL IT jobs these days ask for a person with a degree.

Let us know what you decide, hopefully some of this information may help :)

 

[nijinsky's fetlocks]

I work in IT, as a developer.

Go to Uni, for the love of God. Firstly, you will have the qualification for life. If you lose that job, you're buggered, employers often speak bollocks concerning future plans to get you to sign on the dotted line.

In a few years, you will be in the job market with experience, and will be competing with people who have a degree AND experience.

Also, University isn't just about the studying. You do a lot of maturing there, intellectually and socially. The broadness of your knowledge will be far better, as will the depth. In a few years, you will be glad you did. Don't take the money now, you are losing money in the long term.

Pretty much agree with this,providing you can stand being potless whilst you study and can put in the revision required to sail through the exams at the end.
Worth playing the long game,imo.
Not sure about the "maturing" bit,although your liver may well be in for a profound shock!

 

[mammutly]

I've only got 3 degrees :-(