Is my future plan any good?

Hey there.
After my ALevels I want to do a degree apprenticeship, in cyber security or software engineering (I'll look into more later on).
However, I would do courses of becoming a cEH (Ethical Hacker) and many more courses which are £100-400 each. This is to broaden my choices in the work field.
+ I am studying computer programming by myself at home.
I just want to know if this would be helpful for me in the future, in terms of finding a good career in these sectors.

Reply 1

Gent2324

Careers Forum Helper

do you know how to code?

Reply 2

FutureMissMRCS

@winterscoming can help. :smile:

How's the programming going,what programming language(s) are you learning?

Reply 3

winterscoming

Original post by FutureMissMRCS

@winterscoming @Acsel can help. :smile:

How's the programming going,what programming language(s) are you learning?

Will add my thoughts too, thanks for the tag :smile:

Original post by erwqrw

I agree with everything @Acsel has said about this above, so just going to echo what he's said about making sure that you spend time deciding which route you'd prefer because it's actually quite difficult to switch to a different path once you're on an apprenticeship.

Of course, switching isn't impossible because quite a lot of IT skills are applicable to many different types of IT careers, but you would need permission from both your apprenticeship employer as well as the apprenticeship training provder in order to switch (it doesn't happen very often at all - there's much less flexibility compared with a university course). Most of the time the only way to switch is to start again, althoug hthe application process would be just as competitive the second time around.

Teaching yourself programming is a great idea though; building up your general IT skills will help a lot when applying for these kinds of apprenticeship schemes. I'd also recommend looking towards some other general/transferrable IT skills such as making sure you're confident in using your O/S (*nix skills are really useful if you've never used that before). It also helps to learn about databases and SQL as well; but these are all things that you can incorporate into personal projects you might end up working on while you're working to improve your programming skills. (e.g. building a database-driven app that runs on linux)