You hear “coding” and you think, “Silicon Valley.” (And probably a number of other things that are the exact opposite of workers at factories and other classic blue-collar jobs.) Yet a mere eight percent of the nation’s coders are actually in the valley. No, instead the vast majority of the positions are spread across America, providing solid middle-class occupations for workers who’ve been trained to work with their hands. (After all, that’s what typing entails.) And more of these jobs are on the way.
Clive Thompson argues for Wired that while our nation may be losing, say, traditional jobs at the auto factory, the next big blue-collar career has already arrived. Thompson writes:
“These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling JavaScript for their local bank. That’s a solidly middle-class job, and middle-class jobs are growing: The national average salary for IT jobs is about $81,000 (more than double the national average for all jobs), and the field is set to expand by 12 percent from 2014 to 2024, faster than most other occupations.”
To read more about a new way to look at our economy, and how this could change our educational system, click here.
—RealClearLife Staff
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