While we are surrounded by technological wonders that seem to provide a never-ending source of efficiencies and improvements to our daily lives as well as novel forms of entertainment, the digital marketplace is still somewhat in its infancy.
While it seems as though there can’t be anything more that computers can do for us, there are plenty more bewildering technologies in the pipeline, not least virtual and augmented reality, and many of these will soon be fully integrated into our lives.
As a result, graduates of our digital skills degrees, and in particular those on our ”Digital Technology Coders” Stream, have an ever-growing pool of career opportunities that they can enter into. Below are just some of the career prospects available to coding grads and some of the career pathways they might follow.
Programmers put together the nuts and bolts of the software we use and also spend much of their time debugging existing code.
Big Data is the great resource of our time and data analysts are its miners. They find ways of taking seemingly indigestible quantities of data and making them make sense.
In some ways, User Experience specialists bridge the gap between software and data. They figure out how best to present the results of analysis to the software’s end user.
The internet is our portal to software services and the data they provide. Web developers are responsible for far more than just building web pages. They have to facilitate often complex cloud software services being used remotely from many devices.
Longer term, coding careers can develop into some of the following roles:
Upon seeing an opportunity in the market for a new piece of software or receiving a spec from a client, software designers need to decide how an application will work, what it will do and how it will do it.
Software Architecture can be seen as the part of software design that deals with high-level design choices such as the tools, platforms and standards to be used. More generally, software design may also include lower level design choices such as algorithm design.
As this list attests, software development is a complex procedure with many different moving parts. To be cost effective, these parts have to come together on schedule and within budget. Making sure that happens requires the very particular skills of a project manager.
There is not only huge demand in the tech industry for workers to build new products. There is also a need for researchers to discover the potential new products of the future.
Academic institutions are building tech development centres with the large funding they receive from industry while corporations are expanding their own R & D departments to rival that of many top tier universities.
One of the reasons why the tech industry is so dynamic is because the bar to entry is so low. One person with a cheap laptop and an internet connection could become the next giant of Silicon Valley.
Of course, in reality, you are likely to the need the help of a few specialists. With the right business acumen, even a small amount of coding knowledge can bring you far.
