There are 2 future career possibilities for kids and teens who start coding early.
One, they grow in it and become full software development majors: computer scientists, software development engineers, or quality engineers.
Two, they grow in it appreciably well but not to the extent of becoming full software development majors.
Here are 5 ways knowing how to code will position your kids and teens in their future careers.
They can become software developers
This route is quite straightforward. Because they started early, when it’s time to choose a course to study in college or university, choosing software development-related courses is a likely and easy choice. Even if they don’t, when they graduate, they can still pursue a career as a software development major; that is, a profession that involves writing code – a computer scientist, software development engineers, or software quality engineer.
Here is something to think about.
Starting how to code early will give your child years of experience when they graduate college and are fully ready to work. Imagine your child starts coding at the age of 14 and keeps at it actively. By the time they are 21 and ready to work fulltime, they’ll have had 7 years of experience.
They can pursue other careers in the software development process
There is what is known as the Software Development Lifecycle. It a series of steps that is followed for a software to be developed. The steps are: analysis, architecture, design, development, testing, and operations.
And each of these steps has an attendant career.
For analysis, we have business analyst. For architecture, we have software architect, and for design, we have database designer and user interface and experience designer. In development and testing, the professions are software developer(frontend and backend), software tester, scrum master, and product owner. And in operations, there is the DevOps engineer.
In the careers listed above, while experience in coding is good, some of them do not require it. For example, business analysts, scrum masters, and product owners do not require coding in their daily tasks.
So you can see. Even if your kids, after learning how to code, do not go on to become full software development majors, they are well positioned for other professions in the software development process.
They can pursue careers in other fields of IT like Networking and Security
Now, there are 4 main fields in Information Technology (IT).
They are: Database Management, Software Development, Networking, and Security.
In all these fields, at the very core are 2 things – hardware and software. Going deeper, we know that a hardware cannot function without a software. In other words, software is at the very core of all fields in IT.
If your kids learn how to code, the knowledge they gain would introduce them to topics in these IT fields.
In Database Management, they would have learned topics like databases, tables, columns, fields, queries, and SQL. In Networking, they would have learned and used few protocols like FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. In Security (also known as Cybersecurity), they would have learned topics like user authentication and authorization.
They become a good fit for operational roles in other tech verticals like EdTech, HealthTech, and FinTech
The world has leveraged tech. So well and much that it is said that we’re experiencing a tech revolution. We’ve had revolutions in the past like the mining, mechanical and electrical revolution. Now, it is tech and artificial intelligence.
Presently, we have companies set up to develop software in just a sector of an economy. For example, an EdTech – a company set up to develop an app that teaches students Mathematics.
As someone with experience in coding, your kids can take up operational roles in such a company in the future. They can be the co-founder, financial officer, accountant, customer care officer, etc.
Their past knowledge of coding would help them really understand the core of the business – software development. They would know what it takes to develop, test, ship, and use the product because they have written code before.
They become better users of any software they may use in any career they pursue
Knowing how to code stretches one to discover and use the computer in many ways.
When your kids learn how to code, they would get to understand that there are many ways to use a software. They would know how to use shortcuts and how to navigate or troubleshoot any app.
In the future, while their colleagues (with no tech background) may need some training before they use a software, your kids would realize that using a software comes so easy to them. They just run the software and figure it out on the go. They also become their colleagues’ go-to person to help troubleshoot or use the app if they have issues.