The first ever National Coding Week for Adults launches this September in a bid to tackle the UK's growing digital skills shortage. From 21-28 September 2014 people within the digital industry are being urged to share their expertise with adults in their communities by organising events and training sessions.
National Coding Week is set to become an annual event and aims to get as many adults as possible to learn the basics of coding. It is supported by leading industry organisations including Codecademy, Decoded, FiretechCamp, Women who Code (UK) and the EU Young Advisors group (UK).
The digital industry is fast becoming the most employable sector in Britain yet it faces a skills gap when it comes to the appropriate expertise. It has been estimated that in the next two years an additional 745,000 workers with digital skills will be required, but the EU also estimates that by 2020 there will be up to 1.3million jobs unfilled due to the lack of relevant skills.
Various events will be held throughout the week in major cities such as London, Bristol, Brighton, Manchester and Belfast, as well as Jersey, Guernsey and right here in the Isle of Man. People can visit www.nationalcodingweek.com for help with organising their own events and for more information on the week.
The Isle of Man Code Club will be taking part in National Coding Week by organising a Code Expo on Saturday 27th September. The event will be held at The Forum between 16:00 and 18:00. There will be an Introduction to Coding to help explain what coding is all about, and a number of displays showing off different coding platforms and applications, games and utilities
that have been developed with these platforms.
Owen Cutajar, founder of the Isle of Man Code Club and EU Code Week Ambassador for the Isle of Man said, “This is a great opportunity for us to show off our local talent, and encourage others to start coding. We will be demonstrating what can be done in Java, .Net, Python, Blender and other languages targeting desktop, web and mobile devices. We would also like to invite other developers to come and show off what they have built, and projects they are working on.”
