I was listening to Jonathan and Brad on their ChooseFI podcast all about coding this week and found it really interesting. They were interviewing Ryan Carson from Treehouse, an online coding tuition course website, who considers coding to be a trade rather than a professional qualification achieved at college/University. TreeHouse originated from a desire to make coding education available and financially accessible to more people, and students can try it for free before committing to a course. One point made during the podcast was that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has predicted that there will be 1.4 million new jobs in tech in the US by 2020, and only 400,000 will be filled by college graduates, so presumably the positions will be taken by those who’ve either studied elsewhere or topped up their qualifications somewhere other than college.
Fingers crossed Little Fu#1 will benefit from a similar scenario in the UK after he found college and University wasn’t for him right now.
He attended our local grammar school and was planning to continue in the Sixth Form there to do A-levels. At the time he’d no idea of a career goal, or the path to it, so he chose subjects he’d enjoyed at GCSE. Things started well, but by Christmas, the sheer workload of A-levels started to take its toll, and, at the suggestion of school (who were very supportive) he dropped one of his four chosen A-levels.
For us as parents, though, this made us think deeply about whether he was doing the right thing at all. Continue reading →
