Coding will be one of the most in-demand skills for all sorts of jobs in the future
Burning Glass, a job market analytics firm, carried out a study last summer to find out that over seven million bob openings in the previous year required coding skills, seeing general programming jobs rise 12% faster than the market average. Their report can be found here.
The results come from researchers broadening the scope of their analytics to include coding skills across five major job categories:
– Information Technology (IT) worker
– Data Analysts
– Artists and designers
– Engineers
– Scientists
One of the fields where coding is becoming increasingly popular (and necessary) seems to be in anything that has to do with biology.
The National Institute of Health in the US has been rooting for skills and training such as coding to be added to biomedical graduate training since 2015, however, it unfortunately hasn’t reorganized its grant priorities to require these kills just yet. Aside from specialized computational biology and bioinformatics programs, very few biology graduate programs require coding classes.
In the meantime, there is an increasing number of scientists who find that automating data analysis could hugely help optimize their work. Typically, they’d ask programmers for help in doing this, but since this option involves a long drawn process and is limiting, a lot of them have decided to take on the challenge and learn coding by themselves, either signing up to online or presencial courses or simply using YouTube tutorials or googling all their questions to learn the trick.
Biologists seem to agree that coding is not only a core skill that helps get basic biology work done, but it also teaches scientists to analyse and solve problems in different and new ways. Whilst scientist seem to realize coding is core to their career, they will have to fend for themselves until the topic becomes integrated in basic biology undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
