10 Jobs Where You Can Stand Out from The Crowd If You Know How to Code, Best Way to Figure Out.

Coding has long been thought of as a world of computer nerds — from video game designers to IT specialists. For years the media has focused on coding as a path chosen separately from traditional careers. However, many of those representations date back to before the widespread usage of the Internet rose in the 1990s, and today’s workforce is a very different place.

Nowadays, there are a growing number of careers where being a coder is not just a good addition to your resume, but even essential for “keeping up with the Joneses”. From the corporate world to public education, government to the hospitality industry, coding knowledge can unlock a whole suite of useful job benefits, which is drawing more and more career workers to online coding classes to build out their skill set.

So what careers benefit the most from a knowledge of coding? How can you increase your chances for job success (and promotions and raises, among other things) by choosing to learn to code while working in careers that are rapidly being shaped by programming knowledge? Here are 10 jobs where you can stand out from the crowd if you know how to code.

#1: Marketing 

As our recent exploration of how PHP is shaping modern marketing explored, knowing how to code while working for a marketing company isn’t just a nice idea — it’s being actively sought out by some of the biggest players in the industry. From knowing how to manipulate databases to truly measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, to being able to create your own dynamic advertisements and outreach campaigns and wire them with analytics software, modern marketing professionals are turning to coding more and more these days.

#2: Finance and Investing 

The days of traders shouting on the floor are not quite gone, but as the rise of bitcoin and blockchain technology have shown, the modern financial and investing world has fully embraced all that programming can offer. From designing new financial modeling software, to capturing real-time data to calculate investment risk or long-term profit margins, financial professionals with coding knowledge can avoid overpaying for proprietary technology and instead build their own software solutions. Major firms like Goldman Sachs have been actively hiring more and more programmers in recent years to do just that.

#3: Transportation 

Gone are the days of a gravelly-voiced dispatcher communicating with trucks or buses from a central office over a CB radio. Instead, modern transportation companies rely on cutting-edge software that can offer real-time GPS updates on vehicles, calculate repair schedules and costs to keep the maximum number of vehicles running safely, and optimize travel routes on the fly to deal with changing weather and traffic conditions. Fleet managers who can design or improve their own fleet management software have a significant leg up on rival companies who are still using paper charts and radio communications, and thus take on bigger (and more) clients.

#4: Education 

The COVID-19 pandemic showed the world just how much the education system was begging for a technological revolution — but the smartest teachers were already building their own classroom management and assessment software even before the pandemic began. From building plugins to integrate with common tools like Google Classroom or Blackboard, to designing discussion software to help students engage with course concepts or connect to their classes from any location, coding-savvy teachers have stayed ahead of the curve by building their own solutions to common classroom needs and problems from scratch.

#5: Human Resources 

HR professionals have long needed to stay on top of mountains of constantly changing data — from onboarding and offboarding employees who may be working at dozens of different locations around the globe, to tracking financial and benefits information and disbursements, to staying on top of an ever-shifting payroll. That’s why smart HR professionals are learning to code to design their own software solutions from the ever-growing network of responsibilities as an HR manager. With liability and financial responsibilities that are greater than most other senior-level employees at a company, a coding-savvy HR professional can streamline a company’s housekeeping and bookkeeping operations into a single innovative software platform.

#6: Tourism 

People don’t think of tourism as a field where coding skills can be a huge benefit, but with the rise of AR and VR technology in recent years, there may be no better field for professionals to start taking some coding classes. Tourism hotspots are now developing unique apps for their cities or locations, which can allow anything from QR-code scanned entry or online ticketing to immersive tour experiences that can be accessed anywhere in the world. As “smart cities” become more and more of a norm around the globe, tourist officials who can build software to play off the digital infrastructure of their city can help bring in valuable tourist money at a greater level than ever before.

#7: Event Industry 

The days of paper invitations, lost RSVP cards, mailing entry tickets, and seating charts drawn on legal pads are all rapidly disappearing. Many innovative event professionals have realized that coding can help them build dynamic, 21st century solutions that solve many of the former headaches of planning and organizing an event. Whether you simply want to check people in for attendance purposes, or organize and communicate with a giant guest list of people, creating a proprietary event management app has become a boon for leading event industry companies like EventBrite, RSVPify, and others.

#8: Sports Medicine And Health 

Look no further than some of the biggest professional and collegiate athletics programs and where they are investing their limited resources these days. Many leading athletic training facilities, fitness centers, and athletic teams now use innovative apps and software to measure athletic progress, recovery from injuries, and to develop training programs that incorporate a variety of data points from an individual to build a specifically tailored approach that works for them. That’s why more and more sports medicine and health professionals are adding coding skills to their repertoire, to meet the rising demands from companies and organizations in this field.

#9: Hospitality 

GrubHub, Tock, DoorDash — in just a few years time, apps like these and others have transformed the once-traditional restaurant industry by leaps and bounds. Now, a restaurant without its own online ordering system or communications platform is becoming a dinosaur, and hospitality teams are adding skilled coders at a quicker rate than ever before. While your dreams of opening your own restaurant may not have included a background in Python or Java in the past, they ought to now if you want to stay competitive in this cutthroat industry.

#10: Industrial And Manufacturing 

Automation has been a rising force in the traditional fields of industrial production and manufacturing for decades now, but the switch to AI-powered production and factory operations over the past few years especially has exploded the demand for skilled coders to work in factory management positions. Knowledge of cutting-edge fields like machine learning or the Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer just a benefit of a new hire — it’s rapidly becoming essential in everything from agricultural production to supply chain management. Anyone planning a career in these areas is only getting ahead of the continual shift toward automation by being able to work with the actual code behind the hardware and software in modern factories.