Web Developer Jobs Could Solve Young Unemployment
A few thoughts on how the rising demand for web developer jobs could solve young unemployment in the UK.
For starters, businesses have been gradually migrating to the online spaces for over a decade now. Meanwhile HMV and Blockbuster going into administration after losing out to online competitors seems to have accelerated that process.
The only problem is that there don’t seem to be enough front end web developers to actually meet the demand. Meanwhile the demand for web designers is falling. So what this tells us is that the rapidly growing online industry needs people who can create and code – right now!
Meanwhile, we have 979,000.unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds who were the first generation born into a digital, media rich, internet obsessed world. Bizarre as it may seem, they’ve never known life without Smartphones or the internet.
So the rising number of web developer jobs could provide ample employment opportunities for proactive you people struggling in an increasingly difficult jobs market.
Learning Code
Interestingly enough, there are all manner of initiatives in the US trying to encourage computer programming to be taught in schools. Meanwhile computer science degrees in the US and the UK don’t actually teach people how to code.
To top it off, employers are only interested in work experience, self tuition and personal projects. Because when everyone and his dog have an expensive university degree, a certificate of higher education isn’t the commodity it once was.
Meanwhile, all of the various developer languages can be readily self-taught using free online resources. You just need to pay to take a certification exam when you’re ready.
There are great career opportunities out there right now. And we, as a digitally connected world, need people to start filling vacancies and start training for the rising number of vacancies in the future.
And while we’re at it, we can stop wasting millions on higher education that doesn’t teach our kids anything they need to know for a career in the real world.
So suddenly we could have a generation of people who know how to code who aren’t paying off student loans for the rest of their lives. They can spend that money on nice things and strengthen our economy instead.
Obviously, this is all a big ‘what if’. But wouldn’t it be nice if the internet could give us all the opportunities we deserve?