Age Concerns

Age is an issue at two main points in your career:

• When you can legally start working full time to make your living
• At the end of your career, when you become eligible to retire and apply for the state pension

Otherwise, because of a recent law (October 2006) to end age discrimination at work, your age should have no bearing on your career progress.

Starting out on your job, training or course after school

In Scotland about 64% of 16-year-olds stay on at school beyond their official leaving date and do a fifth or sixth year. That means that only slightly more than one third of young people decide that they want to leave school as soon as they possibly can.

If you want to know how soon you could leave, you should be aware that there are two official leaving dates at the moment:

• If your 16th birthday falls between March and September, you can leave school on 31 May.
• If your 16th birthday falls between 1 October and the end of February, you can leave school when the term ends in December.

So some people can leave school at 15!