Trends 2015: Why more and more "non-techies" are learning layout

Previously, the term “computer literacy” essentially meant the ability to work with an office suite, but life does not stand still, and now more and more experts (and even NBA star Chris Bosh) claim that the ability to to program.

At the same time, programming is a huge field of knowledge, only a small part of which can really be useful to an ordinary person (that is, a “non-techie”). We believe that the basis of "new computer literacy" should be knowledge of the layout. In today's topic, we will look at examples of how the study of web technologies can help representatives of non-technical professions.
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Why the importance of knowledge of web technologies is growing

Almost every company is now one way or another present on the Internet, and knowledge of the basic technologies on which it is built, can be useful not only for technical specialists. Do not forget that many professions themselves have become much more "technical".

For example, a decade ago, a marketer who writes great press releases and comes up with ideas for advertising campaigns would be a real star in his company. Today, the work of such specialists is based on data, the results of A / B tests, on the basis of which mailings and landing pages are created. Now, to become a truly strong specialist, more and more often, knowledge of HTML with CSS is also required.

Working with content in social networks without at least a basic knowledge of web technologies is also difficult, says the partner of the Little Big Agency SMM agency, Maxim Yurin:

Even SMM workers sometimes require basic knowledge of layout and wiki markup, for example, to create an interactive post or Vkontakte page, fix something in a Facebook tab, etc. When we hire employees, for us knowledge of layout is a big plus for the candidate.

Similar changes have occurred in journalism - many media outlets have recently completely moved online, closing printed versions. This means that journalists often have to not only write good materials, but also to impose them in the admin panel of the web version of the publication. Often, such WYSIWYG editors behave unpredictably, and if you insert text from an editor like Word or Google Docs into them, the result can put an unprepared person in a dead end.

Knowing HTML in such a situation will help determine where in the page are unwanted tags and remove them. In addition, knowledge of typesetting allows you to save a lot of time and in some cases create “laid out” documents in a notebook at once (our free basic courses are devoted to formatting documents using HTML and CSS ).

With the thesis about the importance of knowledge of layout for journalists I agree, for example, the chief editor of the publication " Zuckerberg will call " Konstantin Panfilov:

In general, it is strange to ask a question about the need to know the basics of IT in 2015, when our whole life already depends almost entirely on machines. A journalist working on the Internet is required to know at least the basic HTML tags and a bit of CSS - all the admins I know allow you to edit the code manually, and you won’t wake up your signature every time you have a picture caption?

Because we all know that it is much safer to edit the code directly than to use the visual editor, which seems to be impossible to completely get rid of bugs. Therefore, I am glad that I learned HTML at school, and I highly recommend those who did not have time to do it - at least you will have a piece of bread after you ****** (kicked out) from work. The crisis is the same.

How else make-up knowledge makes life easier

Companies do not always have dedicated designers who help marketers, which means that the latter have to take on some “designer” tasks for themselves - for example, deal with the design of email newsletters or modify the site pages. In order to test the effectiveness of different variants of letters or landing pages, their pattern may need to be changed. Knowledge of the layout and the ability to work with tables and forms in such a situation will help not to “break” the formatting, and if it does happen, return everything “as it was”.

In addition, technical companies occupy leading positions in many rankings of the best employers and provide really attractive working conditions. That is why many people of non-technical professions seek to get into such organizations.

However, in addition to beautiful offices, social packages and rest rooms, IT companies have many techies whose mindsets may differ from what a conventional marketer could get used to at previous places of work. And for successful work with them you need to try to find a common language. And techies value their time and do not like when they spend it on simple tasks.

This is what Sergey Dmitrichenko, co-founder of the AmazingHiring HR startup and managing partner of the GMS recruiting agency, is talking about .

When hiring non-technical specialists, but often interacting with developers by the nature of their activities, general technical literacy and knowledge of web technologies, in particular, are often important. Employers have appropriate requirements for candidates.

Let me explain why this is necessary:

1. Simplified communication with technical people. In order not to go far for an example, for the IT recruiter profession, technical knowledge is needed both when receiving a vacancy from a customer - for understanding tasks and requirements, and when communicating with candidates, to tell about the technologies used in the project and correctly answer at least basic technical questions .
2. Such a specialist can solve some simple technical tasks on his own, without the help of developers. This is a great time saver, and especially valuable for teams that have limited technical resources.

Some statistics

Recently, the economic situation has been characterized not differently by the word “crisis” - many companies have to carry out staff reductions and add jobs to the remaining employees. This means that even employees of the older generation (45+) will have to learn to interact with corporate sites in order to save their places — at least, to publish various documents on them. In addition, many people will find themselves in a situation when their past profession will not be in demand, and they will have to choose a new career path.

All of the above leads, among other things, to the fact that more initially distant people are engaged in the study of programming and web technologies. According to statistics from our service in the period from February 2013 to February 2014, the number of students over the age of 45 years who study web technologies in the HTML Academy was only 2.3% of the total:



Over the next year (February 2014-2015), this number was already 4.9%:



The number of female students has also increased significantly - from 12.6% to 16.4%. Many of them work in journalism and marketing, so the growth of their interest in the study of typesetting is not surprising.

Another interesting point: students studying layout at the age of 35 years and older, not only became more, but they became more responsible approach to learning. Last year, representatives of groups of 35-44 years and 45+ years viewed about 7 pages on the HTML Academy website and spent 12 and 13 minutes on the site, respectively:



This year, the share of visitors from these groups has grown, the bounce rate has dropped significantly, the depth of views and the time spent on the site for solving practical tasks for training have increased:

Conclusion

The trend to increase the demand for programming is obvious, and, as our statistics show, more and more people are beginning to become more familiar with the world of technology with the study of HTML and CSS.

One of the main advantages of studying such basic web technologies (besides the fact that employers like job seekers who know them) is the fact that they are an excellent first step in learning other programming languages.

Not everyone will want to learn programming (the same Linus Torvalds considers it right ), but an understanding of the principles of the Internet in the age of technology development will definitely not be superfluous.