Improving your chances of becoming a commercial pilot, or improving your chances of sponsorship?
Either way, you’re making a good start by doing a PPL. It demonstrates commitment to flying, and will give you more to talk about at an interview than someone with zero hours.
If it’s sponsorship you’re after, good luck. Work on around 1,000 applicants for each place, and even allowing for the 50% that will be binned straight away because the applicant couldn’t spell or used the wrong coloured ink, you will be up against some very stiff competition. Formulate a plan ‘B’ just in case – like the great majority of pilots – you fail to win sponsorship. A great interview question is to ask the candidate what they would do if their application fails – if you can answer that by describing your back-up plan (“I’d reapply as soon as I’m allowed / take any job to pay for flying / sell granny to raise the money”) you’re showing determination to succeed and maturity in considering the downsides.
Academic qualifications are beneficial whatever the job, and are an absolute must for sponsorship. At your age, they are the only way to differentiate piles of CV’s, so decent ‘A’ levels should be your minimum target. The benefits of having a degree have been debated to death here; suffice to say there are good arguments for and against – it boils down to your personal situation and academic leanings. Rest assured, however, that having a degree on your CV won’t do you any harm.
Hang around airfields. Get a Saturday job if you can; you will learn an awful lot about aviation, and you’ll get to meet lots of pilots. You might be able to cadge rides in aircraft, and even on bad weather days there will be plenty of people around to chat to and get advice from.
Use the resources of the internet. Pprune is a great starting point, and if you’ve got a question, someone here will have the answer. Have a look at GAPAN’s website, they have some excellent material on the various careers and routes into commercial aviation.
One final tip – written English is very important, and people underestimate it at their peril. It isn’t difficult to run everything through a spell-check before posting – I cut and pasted yours into Word to write this, and the computer found 12 spelling mistakes in your post. You might think I’m being pedantic here, and you might well be right, but if I had to choose between two identically qualified candidates and the only difference is that one has poor spelling, grammar and punctuation, which application form do you think is going in the bin?
There’s plenty more advice I could give you, but it’s past my bedtime and I’m starting to bore myself to sleep.
Good luck with the PPL and beyond!