Considering a career in coding? It’s not as difficult as you think

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DUDUZILE RAMELA: You’ve probably heard these words before, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, and, no, not the snake, but the jargon, and it’s oftentimes relegated to a select few. If you’ve always wanted to learn about this space; but thought maybe it’s not for you because of what you’ve studied before, worry not, pivoting to a career in coding is said to be less intimidating than you may think.

Mvelo Hlope is CEO of Zaio. He joins us now for some tips on how to enter and be sustained by the world of coding. Thank you very much, Mr Mvelo, for your time this afternoon. What is coding?

MVELO HLOPE: Hi Dudu, thank you for having me. Coding generally is the language that we use to speak to computers, to programme or create an outcome within them. So we use it to make applications. We use it to make websites. So we basically speak to the computer to be able to generate those things.

DUDUZILE RAMELA: And you’ve actually got practical examples of people who have come from quite interesting backgrounds who have made it into this space, whereas before, it was seen as maybe for the select few. I can’t talk to computers, but it’s actually much more simpler than we thought.

MVELO HLOPE: Oh, definitely. I think the misconception is that you needed to have a certain background. Even in school you needed to have studied certain subjects. We get told to make these decisions when we’re 15 or 16 or even 14 years old, and then they define the rest of our lives.

But no, you can definitely jump into the world of coding. It’s pretty simple as well once you’re in it, and really anyone can do it.

DUDUZILE RAMELA: Okay. Talk us through the A, B, C steps then, if it’s that simple.

MVELO HLOPE: There are multiple tutorials out there. I think what we do specifically at Zaio is we have free coding courses that you can firstly take to figure out is coding something that you really want. Is it something that you see yourself doing as a career. Then post that we do have other courses that are more in-depth that you can then take on an advanced basis.

Here you have access to tutors who can help you through your coding journey. Then once you’ve gone through your coding, you get your certification and your accreditation, and then we help you land your first interview for your job.

DUDUZILE RAMELA: And what if I want to be an entrepreneur in this space?

MVELO HLOPE: Certainly, we do get quite a few people who do decide to go the self-employed route as well. So we all understand that most businesses need to be online these days. So if you are an entrepreneur and even if you run a shop or you’re selling goods, you bake goods and you sell goods, you do need some sort of online presence.

So if you want to then have an e-commerce website, coding is definitely for you where you can learn how to build that website and be able to then sell your goods through your platform or your website that you have built.

DUDUZILE RAMELA: Okay. Mvelo, just as we are trying to understand coding, then in comes artificial intelligence, AI this, AI that, what do you perceive the introduction of this will do to the space of coding?

MVELO HLOPE: More than anything, it’s going to help developers or people who can code to be more efficient in what they do. So AI is not coming in to replace developers.

AI is coming in as a tool that developers or people who learn how to code can use to be more effective in the work that they actually do.

So it’s a companion rather than something that’s taking their jobs away or a threat to them.

DUDUZILE RAMELA: Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon, Mvelo Hlope, CEO of Zaio.