Coding is more than an incredible hobby – it’s a skill that you can feel proud to learn. When mastered, coding can lead to career development opportunities in an array of fields. However, in addition to improving future job qualifications, coding also improves your personal development by helping you acquire necessary soft skills. Read on to learn 4 soft skills that are honed by coding.
Teamwork
You start developing many skills the moment you begin learning to code in a classroom environment. Working with instructors, asking questions, and taking feedback with a good attitude all require teamwork. Once you go into the workplace, you will no doubt be assigned projects that call for collaboration between other coders, outside departments, and even hired contractors.
One aspect of learning to code that’s attractive for many people is the potential to work from home, but even then, you will have to maintain contact with co-workers to ensure you’re all on the same page.
Creativity
The perception of programmers portrayed by the media is often a distorted one, usually a math wiz in a basement placed in front several monitors typing away robotically. Don’t get us wrong, there’s lots of math involved and double monitors rule but the creativity it takes to code really does go unnoticed. The reason your creativity expands when you learn to code is because you begin to possess the tools to build almost anything you want, whether you learn to build video games, virtual reality programs, robots or websites, the possibilities are endless.
Critical Thinking
Coding can involve an onslaught of information at once, especially if you’re just beginning your education. Over time, your ability to not only understand the information on the screen, but also develop solutions based off that data will improve. There are tons of resources out there for solving coding problems, but in the professional world, problems may arise that have no existing solutions. Analyzing lines of code to locate the exact location of an error, or piece that can be modified for a specific action takes critical thinking skills that can be honed over time.
You will get to a point where you can solve problems quickly, but this will take time and something else…
Patience
Learning to code is like learning to play an instrument, except where you’d drive yourself crazy trying to extend your pinky to the 7th fret, you’ll instead be tempted to smash your keyboard while attempting to change a color or font size on the screen. Coding can be frustrating at first and takes practice to understand fully – and with technology and programming languages constantly evolving, you’ll truly never fully perfect it. But, you can have the patience to learn new things, no matter how challenging they are.
The road to coding mastery is one filled with ups and downs, but the rewards that come with it will soon show on your screen and within yourself.
