Why Technical Literacy Is Important
What I read: How to Excel in Tech Without Learning to Code by Justin Gage. Published January 28, 2022.
Let me start this post with a personal story.
Many years ago in the early 80s I moved to Los Angeles from New York City and was migrating from a career as a dancer and performer to, well, I wasn’t quite sure what was next. I left college my third semester to pursue my dance career and never regretted it for a moment. But it left me in my early 20s without any other particularly useful professional training. I had to make a decision if I was going to continue working in dance and the performing arts or was I going to pivot to something entirely different.
I decided to pivot.
One of the first income generation things I did was temporary office work. My high school typing class ended up being the most important class I ever took (really) and landed me a lot of temporary office work gigs. The work was fine. Most of it wasn’t especially exciting. But it was paying the bills and the money flow was consistent.
Among the temporary jobs was one at a large bank in their real estate division. The Vice President of the division was a wonderful woman who epitomized competency and empathy. Great person. Because of her I stuck around that gig for a while. She liked me. I liked her. The day-to-day in that office was peaceful and I was learning some new things.
One day a small mainframe computer was delivered to the office and it got parked in the large space that had been my work home for about two months. I asked the Vice President about the machine.
She said, “We had extra budget we had to spend or lose. I know we need to computerize our operations. So I went ahead and bought the computer.”
I said, “Who is going to run it?”
She said, “I don’t know yet. We bought it but no one knows how to use it.”
I said, “Give me a week.”
She did. I read the accompanying manuals cover to cover. It had built-in database, spreadsheet, and word processing functionality. I learned how to run it. I had never run a computer of any kind before. I had taken a Fortran programming class in my freshmen year of college. I had technically “written code” before. But the code was the most rudimentary of programs written on paper punch cards (I’m that old). The cards had to be run overnight through a large processing computer in the campus computer lab to spit out results on paper I would debug afterward in my dorm room.
That was the entirety of my computer background up until confronted with this new mini mainframe that fortuitously showed up that day.
Could I have coded a Fortran program at the time I was working that temporary job? No. But what that one class did was give me a certain level of technical computer literacy. Coupled with my lifelong ability to self-educate (thank you dad for encouraging that when I was younger), I was not afraid to learn what I needed to know to run that computer.
About a week later I went to the Vice President and told her I knew how to run the computer. She looked at me with a bit of disbelief in her eyes. Luckily, she gave in to my request to let me show her.
She asked if I could run the word processor. I typed in a couple of paragraphs and out spit the printed version on the attached dot matrix printer (those things were loud!). She asked if I could create a database. I asked for some parameters, typed then in with a few snippets of data, and asked what query she wanted. I ran the query and again out spit the results on the printer. She asked if could create a spreadsheet. I did that too.
For a moment she just looked at me smiling. Then she said, “I guess we found the person who can run this thing.”
She put me in charge of that computer and its operations. Eventually I had a small staff doing a bunch of things to assist the department with this newfangled contraption that was taking the business world by storm. I had squeezed myself sideways into a computer career.
I never took another formal computer class after that. I did a lot of reading, learning, and practicing. Over time I learned enough to be a sought-after word processing specialist (a lucrative career in its day) and became certified by the largest word processing software company at the time. Eventually I started consulting as a software implementation specialist. Those gigs also included me being a classroom instructor training employees on various software programs at companies within the banking, entertainment, and legal fields, the three industries in which I ended up specializing.
Eventually I ended up becoming a technical writer and I loved it. I had to learn so much to be able to write the software documentation and accompanying curriculum training guide. It was exciting to me. That was the aspect of the software industry I ultimately found the most alluring.
Today I’m a Senior Director at a Fortune 100 enterprise software company in one of their highly respected Information Development organizations.
Thanks for bearing with me as I recounted all that. There was a point. The point is that with the exception of that one introductory Fortran programming class in college, I was able to continue to learn and leverage my software and computer knowledge and skills that have proven to be my main source of income off and on for about 34 of my 67 years on the planet. I’ve done many things professionally, but the bulk of my income has come from the software industry in one form or another.
Apart from that single Fortran class, and a few years when I taught myself and became certified to write complex macros to manipulate documents for companies, I never learned how to otherwise write code.
I read articles about various programming languages, computer technologies, business technical workflows, and other such topics. I developed a robust literacy about a lot of technical stuff. But I never truly learned to code.
That was a very longwinded explanation of why the article that inspired this post is so important. People often believe they have to know how to code or otherwise understand the deep inner workings of computers in order to have a career in fields that utilize computer technology or in the software technology field itself. You don’t.
In truth, just about every profession these days utilizes computers to some extent. They are deeply embedded in everything we do from Wall Street stock trade number crunching to taking your order at a restaurant on a digital pad carried by the server.
Computers are everywhere and part of everything we do now. Having at least a rudimentary understanding of such technologies is no longer a nice to have. It’s a must. Computer and software literacy is as important now as the reading, writing, and mathematics foundations that formed the basis of our early educations. Automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics are about to infiltrate every aspect of the business world and only by having some understanding of these technologies will people have a leg up on the better paying and more interesting jobs.
Obviously we don’t need to understand everything we use, in the same sense that we don’t need to know why boiling potatoes in water with baking soda makes them taste better when roasted, or why ice reduces swelling. But technology is a lot more practical than that, because a lot of people work at companies that sell software. And everybody works at companies that use software.
The article leans heavily toward understanding technology to work within some aspect of the software technology industry, but the truth is that knowledge can benefit anyone in just about any field. Even if you’re a solo self-employed person in a non-technical field, it’s likely you’re going to use technology in your business. So the better a general understanding you have, the more effective you will be using the tools and technologies that support your business.
That’s all great, but how do you get started if this is all new to you. The article has some good ideas that I’ll summarize.
Make a plan. Consider focusing on creating one thing (a useful spreadsheet, a simple database, a simple app) and let that goal naturally lead you through what you need to learn to get that done.
Talk to those with the expertise you want to learn. Find someone you can have a quick conversation with and ask some prepared, probing questions that will help you learn better what you want to know.
Google. Get really comfortable using this search engine to find learning resources and information for whatever it is you want to know. Google is the best first entry point for most learning resources.
Maybe learn to code. The article suggests learning to code at least at a rudimentary level. This is good advice, but don’t think you have to go very deep into coding to learn enough to speak intelligently to other coders or other computer technologists. This 101 of the Best Places to Learn to Code For Free article will point you to an abundance of great free learning resources. For most needs, only a basic understanding of coding is necessary.
Follow the experts. Start with some of the influencers and experts in the article including subscribing to the writer’s newsletter (which I only found after reading the article and it’s excellent). However, expand your search for experts to follow based on your specific interests and needs.
If you already work for a company, investigate what learning resources they offer. Perhaps there are people within your company who know what you want to learn and can act as mentors to guide you in the right directions and answer your questions.
The only thing not listed that I always advise is to read books. I learn best from books for most topics and that’s how I learned all my foundation computer and software knowledge and skills. Do an online search for “best books to learn ____” and find the ones that seem to be popular and have a dedicated following.
Another tip I give everyone is learn to touch type. The faster and more accurately you can type, the more productive you will be. Until we’re all consistently interfacing with computers through voice or some other input mechanism, we’ll be using keyboards. If you have to hunt and peck one-fingered, you’re not going to produce work as quickly as you can when you can touch type.
If you’re a newcomer when it comes to computer literacy, there are many sites and articles like this 10 things you have to know to be computer literate that will guide you toward what you need to know and how to learn it.
Until writing this post I didn’t know that December 2nd is World Computer Literacy Day. I’ll leave you with one of the quotes on that page because computers are the future, and the now.
The only way to celebrate World Computer Literacy Day is by learning and accepting that computers are the future and we must embrace them for a brighter future.
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