With the start of the
new academic year Britain has become the first country in the World to make
computer programming a mandatory part of the national curriculum. It’s a move that has been welcomed by many
in the IT industry who claim they are finding it hard to meet the demand for
coders and programmers and with EU statistics suggesting that Europe could be short by up to 900,000 professionals in what it broadly terms the Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) space, there is certainly a feeling that we
need to move fast to plug the so-called “digital skills gap”.
Is It Enough?
Whilst there is surely a
benefit to training up future generations to be more technically adept, does
the new curriculum actually do enough to address the issue at hand? There is
clearly a very real need to produce more programmers, but the broad blanket
term “digital” actually encompasses so much more than cold hard coding and if
we’re putting all our eggs in one basket are we at risk of missing the bigger
picture?
Sure, if you want to
forge a career in web development or dream of becoming a software engineer,
that working knowledge of programming languages is going to stand you in good
stead. But what about the ever growing market for digital
marketing jobs?
Digital marketing is not
a recent phenomenon and broadly speaking the industry has been around for as
long as websites have been selling to the public. In fact this year marks the
20th anniversary of the first online transaction (thank you Pizza Hut!) so we’re not talking
about a sector that’s still in its infancy.
As a discipline, digital
marketing generally covers the following:
- Search marketing (search engine optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign management)
- Online display advertising
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
In the majority of jobs
within these areas candidates will require little or no practical knowledge of
programming languages and instead would be expected to display a combination of
skills, some loosely related to traditional marketing and some more specific to
the digital space. Rather than needing an in depth technical knowledge of
complex website coding practices, a typical digital marketer would more likely
need an understanding of basic website authorship, without ever needing to get
fully “under the hood” of a website. Essentially web designers and developers
tend to work in a separate space and they’re the ones doing the nuts and bolts
work of actually putting websites together.
So Where Are the Jobs in Digital?
It could be argued that
the government are actually being short sighted in their assessment of the
digital jobs market. Focusing solely on the very technical disciplines of
computer programming will quite possibly alienate a lot of more creatively minded
pupils, whilst still failing to address the gap in the market that currently
exists. I carried out a quick tally of jobs being advertised
in my local area and found
that of 148 jobs advertised as being in “digital, media and technology”, just
45 called for programming and developer skills. That leaves over two thirds of
the jobs being advertised in digital being potentially unfulfilled by the influx
of technically adept school leavers in 5-10 years’ time.
I don’t disagree with
the new syllabus making programming compulsory; in fact I think it’s a great
idea. However I do think the problems it could solve are only going to scratch
the surface and that more will need to be done if we really want to prepare
future generations for the digital jobs market.
Got any thoughts on how
the new curriculum will help today’s school children? I’d love to hear your
comments, or feel free to Tweet me @JeffNevil
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