Why Web Development Jobs Aren’t Going Anywhere Anytime Soon

It’s easier than ever to carve a solid career out of web development. One of the greatest benefits is that so many employers and clients have no problem with remote workers. They merely need someone who understands the computer magic that makes their website go from an idea, to a true creation. This makes it easier than ever to embrace life as a digital nomad. We hear so much about burned out, overworked tech workers, but if you’re good, you can live life to the fullest while making a living much easier than many other careers.

Investing your time and skills into quality website creation — even freelance — will likely pay off for years to come, and each addition to your portfolio only makes you more desirable to potential employers.

But what makes web development so sustainable? Perhaps a better question is why are web developers so important to the companies and clients that hire them. A good website must be compelling, beautiful and easy to use. It makes you want to stay and look around awhile, and (gasp!) maybe even buy something. A good app can be designed to enhance your life, make you laugh, make you think, help you create something, or maybe even just have a bit of fun, and ideally, make you feel like you are a small part of the brand or company producing it.

This atmosphere is crucial to any company who wants their online presence to have a lasting impact, and for that impact to turn into sales. The currency of media is attention, and the only way to get users to plunk down more of that (and hopefully make the jump from user to paying customer) is making your website a place people want to come back to again and again. A good web developer can do that.

As a profession, web development was a slowly blossoming industry in the early days of the commercialization of the internet in the mid 1990’s. As the dust settled from great tech crash of the early 2000’s, the fittest websites would survive and some would become today’s tech and consumer giants (for example, if I say “Amazon” you probably don’t think of the jungle first). Quality web design and development got them there. That, and Jeff Bezos.

Around that time, innovative tech languages and programs gave developers new tools to work with, and flash video and video streaming immediately transformed the way the world digests media. Since then, Web designers have been able to add even more equipment to their toolbox, going from Photoshop, HTML and CSS to working with Fireworks, Javascript and jQuery. Meanwhile, back end development collaboration was also made faster and easier with frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Cake PHP, and Code Igniter.

Inevitably, as designers sharpened their skills with these new tools, they were able to revolutionize the overall quality of websites and the internet at large. Companies had no choice but to keep up and make their online representation as good as it could be to compete on this new global scale. This transformative process naturally led to a huge demand for people with these skills and suddenly web development pros found more options open to them.

In the past, referring to web development jobs often simply meant back end developers, but as the profession expanded, the demand for quality front end work grew with it. These days, the industry has fine-tuned web clients’ needs and job titles are hyper specific such as “Drupalista”, “Elasticsearch Architect” and “Senior Node.js Developer”.

The field of web development is expected to grow by 27% by the year 2024. Websites and apps grow more and more relevant each year, as do the pros who create them.

Originally published at illyism.com on March 3, 2017.