Image by: VitorAzBine
By Dexter Lunde
Codecademy is a great tool for new, up-and-coming, and veteran entrepreneurs that don’t know how to use code. In a tech-heavy time period, this type of information is a great stepping stool to help you and your company gain the exposure, knowledge, and know-how that you need in order to thrive.
#1) Ease of Access
Codecademy is making it easier for everyone to be able to gain access to their informative online courses. About two years ago, they received about $10 million dollars for internal growth. They’re showing their progress by opening up their first international office in the UK and having partnerships with the UK, France, Brazil, Estonia, and Argentina.
According to TechCrunch, each partnership has agreed to bring Codecademy to a more localized level so that they can help government and educational groups. In France, they will be working with “Libraries without Borders”. In Brazil, they will be working with the Lemann Foundation. In Argentina they will be working on teaching programming in each of the schools in Buenos Aires. In Estonia, they will be working with promoting IT education in K-12 programs.
All right, so they’re helping people internationally and distributing education about computers and code all over the world. How can they help me, as an entrepreneur? Well, let’s quickly go over some of the benefits of learning code, then specifically see how Codecademy can help you.
#2) Evaluating Talent
Learning code will help you know the basic technological background so that you can have a basis for hiring your tech team. Each company uses technology in some way. You could be building your own website (and maintaining it) or you could be handling online orders or managing mailing lists. In order to understand what you need from the people who will be running these tasks, you need to know a bit of it yourself.
#3) Keep Your Mind Sharp
Being an entrepreneur means that you’re always coming up with ideas that will help your company grow bigger, expand, or even venture out into new territory. How can you do that if you’re stuck in the same rut every day? When you learn new things, you are acquiring the skills that will allow you to be more innovative. You bring that new knowledge into your ideas and create bigger and better ideas.
It is good for your mind to be able to think in new ways and it is good for your brain to be able to build new connections. When you learn new things (especially important things like coding), you are opening up more doors for opportunity for you and your company. Remember that you are the main drive behind your brand.
#4) You Increase Your Own Value
The value of an entrepreneur isn’t just based on how much money he makes but also how much he has to offer. Learning code is like learning a new language and being bi-lingual is the key to communicating in business these days, isn’t it?
You’re adding resources onto your resume. You will be more efficient at work, which will make your team more efficient with their jobs as well.
#5) Saves You Money
Learning code will save you money in the beginning (and in the long run as well). When it comes to start-ups, the whole process can be quite expensive. We don’t often take technology into account when we’re setting up a storefront. However, in order to get the kind of traffic that you want, you will probably need more than just a Facebook page and a blog on blogger.com.
These days, having your own website is crucial. That’s money that you’ll need to give to a web designer, web developer, and whoever you choose to maintain your website. However, if you know code, you won’t need to hire all of those people. At the very least, you will be able to maintain your website once they get it up and running. Also, you can make the necessary changes without calling anyone.
#6) What Codecademy Can Do For You
Okay, so coding is important. What does Codecademy offer that other companies and courses don’t? All right, all right, let’s talk about what they can offer you.
Codecademy can teach you popular programming languages like HTML & CSS (which is the basic language of the internet), jQuery (which will help you use JavaScript to create interactive websites, DOM manipulation, and animation), PHP (which is a server language), Python (which is what is used to build web apps and manipulate data), and Ruby (which is a beginner language for web apps).
They can also aid you in building projects like web applications which you can connect to YouTube and Twitter using an API. The best part? It’s all free.
Do you know code? Has this knowledge helped you or your business? How did you learn code? Did you take a face-to-face course (in a classroom) or did you learn online?