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What Jobs Can You Get by Learning How to Code?

15th May 2019

Learning how to code can open up numerous different career paths. Coding is becoming a larger and larger part of everyday life — picking up this in-demand skill can open up a huge number of opportunities, some of which you may not be aware of.

The jobs that you could get range from the more obvious, like being a software engineer, to thinking about the ethics of artificial intelligence.


We previously posted about five ways to teach yourself how to code, but just what exactly could you do once you learn how? Here are some of the top Coding career paths.

Computer scientist coding on laptop

Web Developer

One of the more obvious choices for someone who knows how to code is to become a Web Developer. Web developers make the front-end and the back-end of websites. Basically, the front-end is what you see and interact with on a website, and the back-end is the foundation — it links the front-end to databases, decides where the data is stored, and makes sure that the server communicates with the rest of the site.

You’ll probably need to know how both the front-end and the back-end works even if you’re only interested in one of those areas, but recently there have been roles for people who can confidently code both, full-stack developers. A full-stack developer is responsible for the overall flow of a website — load time, how the users interact with the site, and basically function as a jack of all trades.

Software Engineer

A software engineer is someone who develops software. They are also known as computer programmers and software developers, but a growing number of universities are now advertising degrees in software development as ‘software engineering’.

Becoming a software engineer could let you work on a myriad of different things, from developing software for android phones to working for NASA. Software engineering is a wide, catch-all term, but every big company now has a need for software engineers to do a variety of work, and the skills that you learn are transferable from role to role

Cyber Security Manager

Cyber Security has been a hot topic in the news recently. With allegations that different countries are trying to affect the outcome of each other’s elections, websites need to be confident that they are secure as possible.

On a typical day, a cyber security manager makes sure that passwords, financial transactions, and emails all function with a minimum security risk. This means writing code that only lets specific people access certain things, deciding how a company should protect their data, and making other employees aware of the best practice to keep everything secure.

Cyber security logo

Artificial Intelligence Ethicist

https://futureoflife.org/Artificial intelligence (AI) has massively grown in popularity in the last few years and is set to change the world with self-driving cars, improved medical diagnoses, and online assistants (such as Siri and Google Assistant) in our homes. All of this development in a fast-growth area has brought up some complex philosophical questions. Understanding how AI works could leave you in a position to help answer them.

One such problem that has been recently highlighted by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, is the question of existential risk posed by AI — can developing AI lead to humanity’s extinction? Generally, their fear is that if we improve AI to a state in which it can then improve itself, it could exponentially become more and more intelligent. This would mean that we would quickly not be able to compete with the AI that we created, and it could, of its own free will or in order to achieve its goal, decide to harm humanity. Institutions such as the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge, and the Future of Life Institute have been formed to understand how to develop AI as safely as possible.

A job that doesn’t exist yet

Who would have known twenty years ago that Oxford and Cambridge would set up centres to develop AI safely? People would have been shocked to hear that Google bought Deepmind, a company only formed in 2010, for over $500 million to compete with other tech companies. One in three of today’s school students will at some point work in jobs that don’t currently exist, and the only way to get ahead of the game is to predict what developments might happen, and prepare yourself accordingly.

interested in pursuing a career in coding? 

You can start by learning to code on our summer school in Oxford.

After graduating from Cambridge, our coding tutor Daniel Timms worked for four years as a software engineer at HP, and now works as a freelance software developer. Under Daniel’s guidance, you can learn the basics and get your foot on the coding ladder.

You can read more about our Coding course by clicking below. 

Coding Course
Tutor teaching coding in Oxford on our summer school