Why Learning How to Code Will Help Your Child's Career Prospects

Chapters

1. How does coding help children?
2. What are the career benefits of coding?
3. What is the best age to start coding?  

Coding is becoming an essential 21st-century skill. Digital innovation is making tasks easier for everyone around the globe, including business organisations. This means that more and more of these companies are now looking to or have already switched to intelligent tech-based solutions. While this is creating a number of great opportunities in many industries, all these jobs require applicants to know one important skill - coding. 

Despite the 74,000 more developers who’ve joined the UK private sector, tech recruiters face a massive digital skills shortage. This signifies the massive impact coding can have on your career.

But how exactly can coding help you with a rewarding career? Let’s find out! 

How does coding help children?

Coding requires you to identify a core problem and break it down into simple, workable parts. All these parts are then solved individually to develop a final solution. This solution is checked for errors/efficiency and then implemented to solve a problem. As is apparent, the entire process is a mental jungle gym! It tests your logical and critical thinking ability and helps you develop important analytical skills.

When coding a simple calculator, you have to code each arithmetic sub-function (‘+’, ‘-’, ‘x’, ‘/’) separately. These are then connected using a central ‘function’ that can be used to get the solution. This helps you develop problem-solving skills through an intelligent bottom-up approach. It also exposes you to various real-life problems that can only be solved after thorough analysis. 

So, all in all, it’s one of the best ways to develop a strong mindset that goes way beyond what you’d learn in the classroom.

What are the career benefits of coding? 

Some of the other benefits of coding include:

Boosting creativity 

While it may seem unlikely, coding is proven to boost creative thinking skills. Programming approaches (like Object Oriented or Functional programming) allow you to explore many different solutions to the same problems. You need to experiment in order to come up with the most efficient solution. Learning how to code can help you get the creative chops you need to succeed in a number of jobs. 

Teaches you organisational skills 

One of the most important aspects of learning how to code is organising the code well. Developing a solid solution usually requires hundreds or even thousands of lines of code that contain functions within functions. It can be difficult to read and rectify this code if it isn’t written well. This is why programmers are taught to arrange and indent their code according to specific formats. Learning how to code can help you develop strong organisational skills. 

Learn to work in a team

The coding community is one of the most lively, bustling communities on the internet. Sites like GitHub.com allow coders to work with each other and develop projects collaboratively. Open source platforms contain millions of packets of pre-written code that you can download and modify to build your own programs. This allows you to work in a real-world, collaborative environment with people from around the world. 

Wide range of career choices

The rapid digitisation of businesses is helping create millions of coding jobs each year. Having IT-related skills makes you eligible for various jobs in data analysis, software design, artificial intelligence and many other fields. 

What is the best age to start coding?

There’s no best age as such, but the earlier the better!

If you’re reading this, you’re probably old enough to start coding. You can start with basic coding, such as initialising integers and printing basic sentences. Once you get started, you’ll notice that it’s just like maths or English. All you need to do is learn the basic syntax just like how you did for English and maths.

Coding doesn’t necessarily involve making a website as complex as Facebook. However, if you plan to be the next Zuckerburg, what better day to get started on your journey than today?

We urge you to book a free coding trial session with GoStudent’s world-class tutors. Our tutors will break down things to help you develop a solid base before building up your knowledge base to even help you with more complex tasks such as building apps and dynamic websites.

We have tutors who specialise in HTML, C++, Java, Python and more to help your child on their pathway to success.