Encourage Your Employees to Learn to Code

In the current digital age, programming shouldn’t be a skill reserved for members of your IT department alone. With the reality that nearly every job is becoming tech-based, including non-technical sectors, such as financial services and higher education, you should encourage your employees to learn to code.

Regardless of whether you manage salespeople, marketers, or any other non-technical employees, learning some technical skills can help in the following ways.

Become Versatile and Indispensable

Employees who proactively learn to code automatically become resourceful, versatile, and bring forth tech-savvy benefits to their employers. With good coding skills, you will lean on your employees for various tasks beyond the scope of their current positions.

For instance, an employee who excels in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS can be a great full-stack marketer. This is beneficial for employers as you won’t have to rely on your development team to make even the smallest changes to your landing page. With basic coding, your marketing department employees can make these changes.

As mentioned, technology has revolutionized all sectors, be it agriculture, finance, entertainment, or medicine. Encouraging your employees to learn to code enables them to understand how these technologies work, making them valuable team players. You can confidently rely on them to manage your websites, create promotional emails, debug new software, and more.

Improves Communication with Technical Teams

Encouraging your employees to learn to code is also important if your employees frequently collaborate with technical teams. Collaborating with engineers and software developers is challenging if your employees have no clue about how various systems and technologies work. Note that marketing, finance, human resource, and other facets of your business rely on software for their daily activities.

Understanding technical language will enhance communication, collaboration, and respect between your employees and technical departments. They will also be able to evaluate technical solutions and resources required to complete certain projects.

Improves Efficiency and Self-sufficiency

Empowered employees who know how to code will apply their knowledge in various ways in your organization. By understanding how various tools and programs operate, they can use their coding knowledge to improve the functionality of tools that are already in use. For instance, most software, especially open-source programs, can be modified using programming tools such as Python and JavaScript.

With this, your employees can add structures for folder organization, spreadsheet software, reports, and more. This saves your company the cost of hiring experts while increasing productivity.

Enhances Problem-solving Skills

A Future of Jobs Report by the World Economic Forum listed problem solving as one of the top skills for 2025. While this is a soft skill, problem-solving is among the many skills that coding students learn. Part of learning to code includes thinking like a programmer, which involves defining problems, breaking the problem into small pieces, and exploring possible solutions to these pieces.

That said, learning to code empowers your employees to try different approaches to handling a problem or task. To communicate with a computer, programmers should order their thoughts in a logical and structured way. This method of thinking will sharpen your employees’ reasoning and problem-solving skills.

The Bottom Line

As technological innovations shape the work environment, learning to code is not only beneficial to IT departments but also empowers your non-technical teams. The best programming languages for beginner coders are CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Ruby and Python are best for employees with interests in app development.

However, you should find the right training institutions for quality learning. The Coder School provides both physical and online coding training to learners based on their schedules. Enroll your employees in part-time online training to balance their work-study schedules.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.