Boost Your Marketability By Learning How to Code

Who wouldn’t want to know how they could become more marketable in the job market? The more you’re good at doing, the more competitive you become as a job candidate. And adding tech skills to your repertoire is an awesome way to upgrade your professional profile while looking for that new opportunity.

Writer Kimber Gillus details resources that can help you learn a valuable tech skill: coding:

1. Code Academy
Code Academy looks like a gamified web app and manages to teach you how to code without making it feel like a learning experience

. Get through the first few exercises on the main page and you’ll find yourself wondering, “Wow, so this is what programmers do? This is easy!” The New-York-City-based company is good at teaching the basics, and it feels like you’re making progress right away.

Code Academy doesn’t require you to download anything, and you can do tasks at your own pace. If you leave the site, you can even pick up later where you left off. You won’t find many bells and whistles, but now that the startup has Code Academy Projects, you can show off your new skills by sharing them on the social media profile of your choice.

Besides JavaScript (what you’ll learn on the main page), Code Academy features units on Ruby, Python and jQuery–all hot right now, as far as new skills go.

2. Udacity
This California-grown project has been written about in The New York Times with the team building its brand around its acclaimed Computer Science class (or “CS101” for short). Udacity is also brimming with geek-worthy forays like Differential Equations and Artificial Intelligence, and there’s a class on building your

own business, too. Courses are designed around units, with constant “quizzes” for comprehension. Completion of a class garners you a certificate, tangible proof that you passed the course.

The key teaching component of Udacity is lecture-style YouTube videos. This could be distracting if you’re in an open work space, and sometimes (especially in the introductory classes), it feels like you’re learning at a snail’s pace. There’s no in-browser “sandbox” for you to test your new skills–you’ll have to download Python for that. And (oh yeah) Python is the only programming language they teach.

The shining jewel of this e-learning site is their job placement program.

Udacity refers their most impressive students to more than 20 different companies, working through an internal recruiter to find the right match for you! You’ll have to study hard to get noticed, though. After getting the basics, try out the Building a Blog class. Or you could always try Applied Cryptology–you know, for those pesky job application riddles.

Read more at Brazen Careerist …