Smart kid.

Uni's a waste of time academically for a lot of people these days. I never went and I've done ok for myself. Less graduates with their heads up their asses could well be a good thing.

Yes it does not suit everyone and for many careers is completely unnecessary anyway.

I didn't finish my degree. I was offered a full time job whilst on summer work placement, and never looked back.

There are academy schools now, who teach on a 'targetted learning' basis, with a bit of buy in from private firms offering placements and apprenticeships. I think targetted learning is a good idea in principle, but you can almost see the headlines of the future - kids being pigeon-holed and railroaded into career paths they weren't seeking.

I didnt need my degree for my current role (not saying it wont help in the future mind you) but I'm glad I went ultimately.

I think as long as they can retrain for another career cheaply this is a red herring. Most people will like a well paid job. If targeted learning gets them that well paid job, unless they hate it I do not think that they will mind. The fact that pretentious parents thought that manual work was menial and beneath them that we ran out of plumbers. Now they earn £60 000 up. That is more than most graduates.

I was talking to a train driver yesterday, he's got a degree in economics!

Talking to another guy high up in the company I'm in just now, his neighbor wanted to be a bus driver but his mother made him go an study accountancy at uni. He did the course, did all the stuff to become a chartered accountant, then went back home and became a bus driver...

Horses for courses.

I was always the brightest one around - I looked like the milky bar kid ffs! I might as well have had a target painted on my bloody face!

At primary school, I was always middle of the class - quite deliberately. And then they did that national IQ test thingy and I scored really rather well. Bugger. I spent the rest of that year being kept in at breaks and lunch for extra maths tuition whilst everyone else was outside playing. Result? I'm really good at maths and I f***ing hate it.

I wanted to go to a local comprehensive with the rest of my friends but my dad made me sit the 11-plus. Even after trying to do not very well, I still got one of the top bloody marks. So off to grammar school I went. Those were the seven most boredom-filled, bullying-saturated, lonely, worst years of my life.

And then I wanted to go to college to get a real trade. But my school and family made me apply not just for university but for fekking Cambridge - toff-filled ar$ehole of humanity that it is. I went with my lowest offer (Aston), got addicted to drugs, joined a cult and emerged after several retakes with a 3rd Class Batchelor's in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. How much use has it been? Fcuk all.

There's a lesson there somewhere...

...and I still want to be a welder.

You see? If you don't got to University, that's the kind of fun you don't get to have.

Jon

You may have a point there...

... but I'd still like my short-term memory back.

Join the club.

Swings and roundabouts though. My nick name was "Boffin" at school. I wasn't deliberately in the middle. I was one of the smartest kids in the school and everybody knew it. They pushed me for OxBridge, but I didn't know what I wanted to do and nobody listened to me. So I pushed back - never finished my A-levels and may have potentially wasted my smartness by not applying myself when I was younger.

I've done pretty well for myself in work terms, but sometimes I wonder what other experiences I could have had at Uni and whether I could have expanded my mind.....

I went to college, but couldn't afford University - my parents earned too much, for me to get a grant, but my father had remarried and didn't have any money spare to pay for my education. So I started working instead. By the time I was 22, I was earning more than the graduates coming out of Uni and starting work in the company - I was also more senior...

It also didn't stop me getting a job as a lecturer at a University!


That is pretty much how Germany works, once you have finished school, you either go on to Uni to study for an academic type job or you get an apprenticeship for a normal job - solicitors, doctors, computer programmers, engineers would fall into the former accountants, category, nurses, bakers, butchers, car mechanics, shop assistants would fall into the second.

To run a garage, butchers, bakers or to run an electrician's business, you need to have done your apprenticeship, then worked in the occupation for a couple of years, then have made your Meister Certificate (Master of the Trade). If you don't have the Meister, you can't run a business in that area - there are some exceptions, like a general store or computer business, but most types of work require a Meister Certificate.

If you inherit a business, for which you haven't trained, you are required to employ a Meister to run the business for you, until you get your own Meister Certificate.

It means each profession is well regulated and has its own professional body, but you can guarantee that the people in that profession know what they are doing - well more or less...

You can re-train for a new occupation or profession, but you start over on apprentice wages, until you have completed the apprenticeship and then you work your way back up through the pay scale for that profession - usually regulated by the level of qualification in that occupation and number of years working in that occupation.

My girlfriend started out with an apprenticehsip to work in a supermarket, then after the children were in school and her husband had left her, she re-trained as a bus driver, but the hours weren't conjucive to bringing up children, so she trained to work in a Kindergarten, then as a cleaner in a nursing home, before getting the chance to work in the kitchens, she has now worked her way up and is head of the kitchen in one home and will start her Meister Certificate course next year - it takes 2 years of classes, for which the employer has to give you time to attend, before you can take the exams.

That sounds like the practising certificate that solicitors and accountants need before they can run their own practice.