FIND YOUR FIRST JOB
Young people in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can leave school at 16. But in England, if you want to leave school at 16, you must find work with official training.
Apprenticeships are the best way to achieve both and with a new minimum wage for apprentices of £3.30 (from October 1), you can earn while you learn.
The key place to search is apprenticeships.gov.uk, where there are currently 14,323 vacancies.
Check out Not Going to Uni (notgoingtouni.co.uk) which has 3,181 Intermediate Apprenticeships (Level 2 equal to five GCSEs), 4,095 Advanced Apprenticeships (Level 3 equal to two A-levels) and 267 Higher Apprenticeships (Level 4 and above to a foundation degree).
The Armed Forces are one of the biggest recruiters of apprentices with the Royal Navy (royalnavy.mod.uk/careers) taking on 2,500 this year, the Army (army.mod.uk/ training_education/25236.aspx), which has the largest apprenticeship programme in the country, is expected to take on 10,000 recruits and the Royal Air Force (raf.mod.uk/ recruitment) is planning to recruit 1,961 apprentices within the next year.