Reasons to learn a computer programming language

It is a massively promoted skill, but as a mid-career professional, will learning programming help you achieve your goals? In this post, we’ll argue passionately that you should.

It will help you improve your website

As you know, everyone and any business worth its salt has a website these days. Clients and customers look for solutions to their problems online, not in the phone book. As such, figuring out how to use HTML to make your website more visible will boost the profile of your web presence immeasurably.

SEO tags that will help you rise up the SERPs include heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) meta tags, title tags, and more. Once you get the hang of these, take steps to learn how to use these in a strategic manner.

A good place to look for current SEO trends is the gambling industry. With tonnes of competition in this niche (especially in Canada), those who win at search engine optimization will appear at the top of the search results more often. By studying how those at the top of Google do it, you can pick up tips and tricks that can help your page rise above your competition as well.

Lots of job opportunities that pay well

Lucrative careers are tougher to come by in 2018. Fortunately, the continuing expansion of the online world means that programmers continue to be in demand, and will continue to be needed for the foreseeable future.

By investing the time to learn a language like Ruby or Python, you’ll put yourself in a position where developers are fighting over the few programmers available to do a job. Even if you are inexperienced, they’d rather take their time with you than have nobody at all, or worse, an incompetent contractor who is all talk but no action.

Salaries in this line of work can get into the six figures easily, with many lower paid positions netting in the high five figures.

You can create valuable assets

Consider yourself more of an entrepreneur? Programming is still a worthwhile skill to learn – not only will it help you with basic website maintenance tasks, but you can use it to create assets you can patent and sell as intellectual property.

Even if you aren’t a master programmer, stringing together enough code to make a working prototype for a more experienced contractor will allow them to create an end product for you that is closer to the final vision you had for it than if you attempted to do everything by yourself.

It will help fine tune your problem solving process

Have a hard time finding your way out of problems you run into? If there is one thing programming teaches well, it is logic. By understanding how one concept follows from another, you’ll have a mindset you can then transfer to other areas of your work and personal life.

Even if you don’t use programming to get paid or make products, pursuing it as a hobby will have a net positive effect on your life.