Branching Out: How Learning Programming Can Benefit Your Career

Observing the pace with which the world is developing can be scary. Even scarier can be seeing new technologies rapidly expanding arenas of careers right before your eyes, while the knowledge you worked so hard for, while still greatly necessary, starts to seem obsolete.

The field of computer science is one of the fastest progressing in the world, emerging out of its own shell and putting its roots in almost every other field of work out there as well. While you may roll your eyes at all these young people telling you that learning these skills is paramount to any work being done in the current world, it is indeed a constructive piece of advice. And if you take this advice to heart, it can prove to be some of the most rewarding, fruitful, and frankly, exciting change that you can bring to your career.

So, here are just some of the fields that can greatly benefit from utilizing the programming skills of its workers,

1. Architecture:

While architecture in itself requires knowledge of some softwares, like drawing and designing tools, basic coding and programming can go a long way in making your life as an architect easier as well as more fun.

Sometimes the usual tools available just aren’t enough to bring the design in your imagination to the computer screen, so, knowing how to understand, access and tweak the inner workings of a software exactly to your liking can go a long way in helping you get the exact features you want in a program. This can be done using an API, or application programming interface, that most programs today have.

You can also find how to automate programs to do your work more efficiently and systematically.

If you want to take your imagination to the highest level, you can also create new programs to help you design stuff just for fun, and then figure out how to make them into reality by helping you do the calculations, as well as algorithms to search for structures that might already exist, or might aid you in making the perfect design.

2. Aviation:

The aviation industry is already a very technical field, and thus uses programming in pretty much every aspect, from maintenance and repair to the radio and communication systems, along with the obvious, the navigation system and route programming.

If, however, you as a beginner pilot have some advanced coding skills to your employment, you can use them to embolden the entire experience on your computer, from real life benefits like working out different routes and the time and fuel they might take, to making a control system simulator as practice for problem-solving in real-time situations.

3. Music:

When you’re working in a creative field like the art or music industry, your brain tends to work in a more free, inventive manner. Combine that with the sharp logic and analytical approach of programming, and you can come up with the most innovative creations that are inductive as well as inspiring!

As a musician, you can use your technical skills to create electronic devices and computer software that aids you in refining a piece of work, as well as in creating actual music! You can create sequencers and synthesizers that create symphonies of musical instruments that are, as they say, “synthetic”. You can have the entire possible range of symphonies at your hand, and program them to sound exactly as you hear them.

You can also pursue Live Coding, which consists of the performer coding into the synthesizer as the composition plays along, and programming and reprogramming it in front of a live audience. As a musician, you can also use coding to provide visuals to your music, and just have fun with it as you go.

4. Journalism:

Journalism is a field of information and research. Gone are the days of a single person holding a camera and wandering the world sniffing for a story. The amount of information and opinions that are reaching to us through social media is too much to process even for an average person. But for a journalist to sift through this disarraying mass of affairs passing through their hands every second, and compiling a story from it, is almost impossible…. If it weren’t for technology.

Using their programming skills, you can create an algorithm that researches the array of news coming to you for you, and find exactly what you need from it. This could include past trends, key words looking for information about a certain person or event, current viral fads to report on, etc… And after you have a cohesive story, you can even include the thoughts and feelings of people around the world who are putting forward their views on the happenings around them, all of which you would otherwise have to do individually.

You can even predict future trends and statistics regarding the world, and its outcome and its consequences.

5. Mental Health Professionals:

The medical field in general benefits greatly if it has personnel that works as a programmer. However, if you are working with mental health in particular, knowing how to calculate and present exactly how someone’s actions in a day are affecting them could make a significant difference in a person’s future happiness.

Creating a program that asks patients to log in their daily habits, such as water and food intake, nutrients gained, a criteria of exercise, positive affirmations received and positive experiences acquired, and using this data to help them visualize just how healthy and productive they were in a day, and how much difference they can make to their lives, is paramount to their basic mental health.

Applications and algorithms them create exercises to help people improve their memory, their cognition, their reasoning is also helpful, as it gives them hope for betterment as well as their therapist or doctor a way of discovering mental problems as well as diagnose disorders that might be causing them this distress, such as ADHD, OCD etc…

Even programming certain software to be on the look out for someone’s mental health worsening based on their screentime, their sleeptime etc… can be a promising accomplishment.

We can ponder upon tons of other fields of work excluded here, such as education, business, media and communications etc… but the answer would be immediate and obvious: coding benefits all of them.

Apart from all these, the advantage of coding that generally applies to every single profession in the world is the fact that it teaches you to think differently, uniquely, rationally and to come up with logical solutions to the problems you come across. It is literally programming your own brain to be more insightful and lucid, which enhances every area of not only your career, but your life as well.

And the best reason for you to start learning programming immediately is quite simple, it’s because coding is fun!