Advice to young people in the UK wanting a career in Tech

If you’re currently in high school in the UK and want to be a GOOD and EMPLOYED software engineer.. this is my advice.

1. Start programming on personal projects right away, and keep it up during your entire working career. Always have something going on in the background.
2. Get into a RUSSELL GROUP university in the UK and take a technical, demanding degree in a computing-related discipline, for example, Physics, Electronic Engineering, Maths, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. If you can’t get into a university and course that isn’t in the top 25% of courses for your subject in the UK, and someone isn’t paying all your bills (e.g rich parents), don’t bother going to university, It’s not worth the loan. Find another way. Look into apprenticeships.
3. Try to not be a total ‘tech head’ and develop some creative and artistic side to you, taking up writing is a really good idea as it improves your thinking and communication skills. Ideally learn to write humanities essays to the standard of the first year humanities majors at your university.
4. Try and get onto as many technical internships and technical work experience as possible throughout your degree.
5. Once you have graduated, and found that the Junior tech worker job market is depressingly non-existant, move back in with your parents and start your informal and free ‘post-graduate’ learning. Take AT LEAST this free course but also certifications such as AWS certs, and anything that you have researched on Reddit etc that you can do cheaply and is sought after by your chosen target job (as evidenced by being mentioned on job descriptions of jobs you’d like to apply for). Increase your work on your personal projects and move to open source them and build up a following from them, and possibly a side-income. Keep in contact with your old uni friends, especially the ones that have got jobs.
6. Read ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport, learn to market yourself, build your LinkedIn presence, network like crazy, and hopefully you will get your foot in the door with that ‘all important’ first job that you can launch a career off of. You’ll certainly deserve it.