Programming and Data Interpretation Are the New Literacy

I hung out with @sgharms yesterday and the conversation was stimulating as usual.

One of the topics was how essential programming will be to future generations. A few general thoughts I took from it:

1. Programming is becoming the new literacy for IT workers and even journalists and marketers.

2. Over the next five years, those who cannot do basic programming (macros, scripting, etc.) in the IT world will become identified as automatic B-players

3. Journalism and marketing will increasingly require the ability to pull from various data sources and manipulate the results to tell a story

4. Pulling and manipulating the data isn’t enough; you also need to be able to interpret what you get back, and that requires basic knowledge of statistics, regression, etc.

Exciting stuff. I’d say, without question, that being able to hit an API and interpret, manipulate, and display the returned data is going become a critical skill for many professions in the near future.

If you are already covered on basics, and you want one technical skill to work on, work on that.

Related posts:

1. The Real Internet of Things: Details and Examples

2. Day-1 Skills That Cybersecurity Hiring Managers Are Looking For

3. The Difference Between Business Intelligence, Reporting, Metrics, and Analytics