Where school can lead
One exam is not one future.
Almost every destination worth reaching has more than one way in, and the best-known way is rarely the only one. Below are 11 destinations and 30 routes into them — including 3 you could start straight after Class 10.
Those are counts of routes we have written down and linked to their official sources — not a prediction, and not a promise that any of them will admit you. Eligibility and dates are set by the authority running each one, and their site is the only place those are reliable.
The routes nobody mentions
Some of these start after Class 10
Most students are told their only decision at the end of Class 10 is which stream to take. That is not true. A three-year diploma taken instead of Classes 11 and 12 leads to work directly, and to the second year of a degree through lateral entry.
- After Class 10A defence-oriented school first, then NDALeads to: serve as an officer in the armed forces
- After Class 10Computer science diploma after Class 10, then a degree by lateral entryLeads to: build software and work with data
- After Class 10Diploma after Class 10, then join a degree in its second yearLeads to: design and build physical things
Destinations
Pick where you might want to end up
Named as work rather than as degrees, because a degree is a step on a route and not the point of it. Each one opens onto every route we have recorded into it.
Build software and work with data
Writing programs, designing systems that handle scale, and working with data. One of the few fields where what you have built matters as much as where you studied.
4 routes recorded · one starts after Class 10
Design and build physical things
Machines, structures, power systems, vehicles, factories. The work of turning a requirement into something that exists and holds up.
5 routes recorded · one starts after Class 10
Design buildings and places
Architecture and planning — how a building stands up, how it is used, and how it sits in the place around it.
2 routes recorded
Design products, images and interfaces
Industrial design, communication design, animation, textiles, interaction design. Selection is on a portfolio and an aptitude test rather than on board marks alone.
2 routes recorded
Do scientific research
Working on questions nobody has answered yet, at an institution built around laboratories. A separate track from engineering and medicine, entered through its own examinations.
3 routes recorded
Practise law
Litigation, advisory work, policy and compliance. Entered straight after Class 12 through a five-year integrated degree.
2 routes recorded
Run, govern or start a business
Management, company law and governance, marketing, operations — and the rules a company has to keep to. Includes the route people mean by "I want to start something".
3 routes recorded
Serve as an officer in the armed forces
Officer entry into the Army, Navy and Air Force. There is a route that begins after Class 12, and a school route that begins years earlier.
2 routes recorded · one starts after Class 10
Work at sea
Navigating or running the machinery of merchant ships. A career most school students never hear named, entered through a small number of specific institutions.
1 route recorded
Work in healthcare
Treating and caring for people. Medicine is the route everyone names, and it is one of many — nursing, allied health, pharmacy and laboratory science are the rest of a hospital.
3 routes recorded
Work with the money side of an organisation
Accounts, audit, tax, costing, financial decisions. Every organisation that takes or spends money needs this done, which is why the work is not concentrated in one industry or one city.
3 routes recorded
This is not everything school can lead to — it is what we have mapped so far, and it grows as routes are recorded and checked against their sources. Sport, the creative industries, agriculture and the skilled trades all appear in the full catalogue while their routes are still being written.