Have you ever considered what jobs you can get with coding skills? Computers and the internet have long been an essential part of everyday life. From online learning, news publishing, and music streaming, to social media, e-commerce, and video chatting—all these digital products rely on coding jobs like computer programmers and software engineers.
With the rise of technology, coding skills have become a must-have, high-demand skill for a variety of careers, especially IT and Data Science. The knowledge you learn in coding also has transferable skills you can use in a variety of other professions and careers beyond tech.
In this article, we’re going to discuss why learning coding as a child can open up more opportunities for their learning development and future careers.
What is coding?
Coding, also known as computer programming, is how we instruct computers to do what we want. It’s a set of languages that allow us to communicate with and control electronic devices and digital data.
It’s how your computer knows what to do when it boots up. It’s how the credit card reader at the store knows to check your available balance first before charging your credit card. It’s how a defibrillator knows how much charge to use when resuscitating a patient.
Coding skills are a must-have if your child wants to enter most computer science careers.
Computer Science Careers
Unsurprisingly, writing code is a key component of many computer science careers. There are many different languages and coding methods you can use depending on what you’re working on. For example, to build a website you may need languages like HTML and PHP. To build a mobile application you might need JavaScript of C++.
When we teach coding skills to children, we use a simplified version to give them the foundational skills to learn these languages faster than average and more in depth as they grow older.
Learn-to-code computer programs for children are a simplified, age-appropriate way to teach our youngest children the concepts of coding. Some programs include drag-and-drop components (or preset commands) that they place together in a sequence to get a robot or computer to carry out a set of actions in a certain order. Children then explore to learn how making the robot turn left 4 times will actually turn the robot around, or that if you make the robot go forward 4 steps it will run into a wall, so maybe 2 steps are enough. Other programs may gamify the concepts to make it fun.
At an early age, we can teach children the principles and logic foundation they’ll need to excel in coding and computer science careers.
Data Science
Coding knowledge can also help your children in data science careers one day. Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, said “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.” The amount of data, and the need to analyze it to our advantage is only going to grow.
Most—if not all—business industry leaders agree that Big Data (extremely large digital databases that are used to compare data and discover trends) will likely be the answer to sustainable success in many areas of our lives in the future. Our world will need data scientists who can take the digital data from internet browsing history, car electronics, GPS devices, and other digital data sources, and use creative coding to take this massive amount of data to pull and organize this data in different ways. This will help us uncover the trends and information to make our world a better place.
In the future, those with coding knowledge will help us process large amounts of data quicker than ever before. The results of this data can be used in nearly any field or profession to help optimize systems, redistribute assets, and become more efficient.
Your child may one day help us use coding to optimize energy use in our homes or could be the one who discovers a more sustainable form of transportation. The answer is in the data and we just need coding experts to help us analyze it.
Other Careers
One of the most critical learning periods is when a child is between zero and about five or six years old. This is the perfect time to teach them coding skills because they can use this foundational knowledge and apply it to other subjects they learn over their childhood (and into adulthood too).
Coding skills can be applied in almost all career fields. Even if your child goes on a different career path, the skills they learned through coding are highly transferable to their childhood development and any future career. These transferable skills include:
- Increased problem solving skills
- Increased adeptness when
- learning new languages and communication styles
- Boosted creativity
- Increased confidence and satisfaction
- Better digital literacy
- Increased interpersonal skills
So, why teach your young child coding?
As you’ve now discovered, coding builds the foundational knowledge your toddler needs to unlock limitless career opportunities. When they learn coding skills at an early age, toddlers enjoy vast advantages in many different areas of their life. These skills will set them up for success in our highly competitive, tech-savvy, and rapidly evolving world.
The future will need critical and creative thinkers, and those who know coding skills. Coding is an essential component of the Core Education & Fine Arts curriculum at CEFA. We have qualified educators ready to teach these foundational skills in an age-appropriate way to your toddler today. Let’s work together to set them on a path to learning and career success now.