The world has changed a lot in the last twenty years. While you might have built a portfolio of skills during your working life, a lot of them may be redundant. So much of what we do is focused on technology and the younger generation is increasingly adept at it. If you are trying to progress, you will be coming up against people that have skillsets that are far more relevant than your own. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late. One of the key areas that employers are looking for these days is a basic knowledge of computer coding. You don’t need to be a genius, but a good level of understanding can help put you ahead of your competitors. Although a lot of people are learning this as part of their basic education, you don’t need to go back to college. There are plenty of resources to help you to learn to code at home, and make sure that you stay relevant in the job market.
Decide On Your Aim
Learning to code is generally a good skill to have, but it also has a lot of direct applications across a wide range of industries. If you have a particular career path in mind that you need to to be able to code for, this can help you direct your learning. There are a lot of different coding languages, all of them with various uses. Knowing what you are likely to use it for, will help you to choose a focus.
Where To Learn
One of the best places to start is kids apps. Schools are starting young when it comes to learning how to code, so there are plenty of resources available that start you off with the basic concepts, laid out in simple terms. You might feel a bit silly, but it will help. From there you can move onto more advanced online courses. Code Academy is one of the better ones out there, but you should have plenty to choose from. Once you are a bit more adept, try building your own software. There are plenty of types of functional testing that you can use to make sure your code runs correctly.
Choose The Right Language
While each language does have it’s pros and cons, it might be best to start out with a simpler one. Once you have learned one, you will find it much easier to learn the rest of them, so you don’t need to stress out too much about which one to start with. Eventually, you will be learning more anyway. If you ask programmers which language you should start with, they will all give you different answers. HTML is probably one of the best to start with. This is the language that is used to build webpages, and it is fairly simple to get to grips with. It will allow you to build a simple structure, if you want to do something a bit more fancy, then you’ll need to learn CSS and Javascript. A combination of all three will allow you to build professional looking webpages. This is something that all businesses can make use of, so regarding job prospects, it is your best option.
