The value of coding
Technology advanced more rapidly than any other innovation in our history. It changed the way we live, work, and even play. Specifically, technological advancements had a profound impact on the labor force, creating new job roles altogether.
According to The Future of Jobs Report (World Economic Forum, 2022), the top 20 job roles in increasing demand across industries are heavily reliant on innovative technologies and specific technical skills.
Technology also created new patterns of work at existing jobs, providing new efficiencies or in some cases, making jobs obsolete. According to The Future of Jobs Report, there are major key findings about how the workforce is changing:
- The pace of technology adoption is unabated and may accelerate even more in certain areas around the globe.
- Market trends show companies shifting towards a 41% increase in utilizing contractors for work tasks rather than full-time, salaried employees
- The skill gaps continue to grow among potential employees. The top skills desired are critical thinking and analysis, problem-solving, and self-management (active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility).
Given the projections of the changing workforce, the education sector has a substantial job to realign their approaches to address these trends. Schools need to:
- Place more emphasis on supporting technology integration and utilization
- Provide opportunities for students to learn and develop soft skills, such as critical thinking, communication, creativity, and collaboration
- Support students’ ability to reskill and up-skill as trends and demands change in the workforce
Although schools and educators may not understand all the innovative and emerging technologies, they play a crucial role in helping learners develop global competencies that will help in the future. Schools and educators can support students’ interactions with technology and develop valuable skill sets while they are in school.
Computer science (CS) is the study of computers and the processes and principles used to make them do useful things. CS is an important facet of strengthening education models and preparing students for the future. Although coding is an element of computer science, computer science isn't just about coding. It's also about developing computational thinking skills, a problem-solving process to help students think about how they work with code, data, and computers.
Computational thinking skills
Pattern recognition: Looking for similarities among and within problems.
Decomposition: Breaking down a complex problem or system into smaller, more manageable parts.
Abstraction: Focusing on the important information only; ignoring irrelevant detail.
Algorithms: Developing a step-by-step solution to the problem, or the rules to follow to solve the problem.
Reflection task
Research your local labor projections and statistics.
- What jobs are emerging?
- What jobs are declining?
- What are the projections for the fastest growing occupations?
- How many of these involve technology?
Additional resources
Interested in learning more about computer science in education? These resources provide more information about supporting high-quality computer science instruction.