What's the new language of business? Hint, it's no longer accounting....

This week is National Coding Week, an initiative that aims to encourage children and adults alike to learn digital skills including coding.  Given that we're currently in the midst of a tech skills shortage that is costing the UK up to ï¿¡63 billion per year, initiatives like this could be critical to the long-term growth of our economy.

We spoke to a number of tech experts to hear their views on the vital role coders play within today's organisations and what can be done to encourage people to learn the digital skills that businesses will need to keep moving forward.

Don't rest on your technical laurels keep learning to remain competitive

Exabeam's co-founder and CTO, Domingo Mihovilovic, explains "Employees with coding skills are now essential personnel in the modern enterprise. Good coders have a unique skillset. Yes, they're technical, but they are also creative, innovative and incredibly good problem solvers. When you run into a bug or vulnerability, if you don't have a good coder on hand, you're in trouble. The demand for coding skills is already high, but this is only going to increase over the next few years. We're at the dawn of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). These technologies are transforming the way we process and analyse data, offering incredible insight to inform sales and marketing, network security, and even product design. We need more people with the skills to manage these evolving technologies. National Coding Week is a great platform to highlight the importance of coding education; more should be done to help students as well as those already in the workplace learn and develop these high-priority skills."

Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora, describes why businesses with talented developers gain an advantage over the competition. "Today, software drives business. So, if an organisation wants to excel, it needs to become a software-powered juggernaut. To achieve this, companies can gain a competitive advantage by the speed, quality and efficiency of software releases. But it can't be done without skilled development teams that are supported by strong and fluent coders. Code creates the foundation that developers build upon and create with; without it there'd be no structure. When I think of the basic skills any organisation­ from startup to large enterprise must have within its ranks, it's the ability to write code that meets rapidly-changing software needs with speed and at scale. Coding is its own language but it's no longer just the language of tech, it's a language of all business."

Cradlepoint's CMO, Todd Krautkremer, reveals why businesses need experts that can stay on top of all the latest technical advancements. "The last two decades have been shaped by pervasive connectivity, the internet, and Web 2.0 technologies. This era has given rise to ecommerce titans like Amazon, hyper-growth SaaS platforms like Salesforce.com and Workday, and media and content ecosystems like Apple. We are now entering a new epoch driven by big data, semantic computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and 5G."

"So, what does this all mean for coders? First, software developers need to be bigger continuous learners than ever before as these new technologies bring with them new programming paradigms, new open source ecosystems and new tools. Secondly, data, algorithms, neural networks and natural language processing are becoming deeply intertwined in code, requiring more end-to-end systems knowledge than ever before. For those seeking a career in technology, the need for data scientists will continue to outstrip demand as the world is currently generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day."

Code securely and protect your assets 

Digital Guardian's managed services security engineer, Naaman Hart, believes having employees that understand how to develop secure code is vital to companies' security posture. "Key considerations include keeping things simple. Overly complex designs lead to bugs, and bugs lead to vulnerabilities. Avoid this by writing succinct code. Adopt a 'least privilege' approach. This means designing your code to be executable with the minimum amount of permissions. If your program needs full admin rights to function, then it becomes a very attractive target for exploitation. A third consideration is to validate inputs and purge unnecessary data. Make sure that data entered into your system is accurate for its purposes. Don't trust the user to get the input right. Limit them to what you want to receive. Once you have that data, anonymise or purge anything that isn't required before you move it on to the next subsystem or task."

"Lastly, spend a little time and read up on the simplicity of exploits like SQL Injection and Input Validation Attacks. For the sake of a few lines of code, many a large business has been compromised to the tune of millions. Avoiding the same pitfalls is an excellent starting point."

Similarly, VP of technology partnerships at WinMagic, Garry McCracken, thinks that encryption basics should be taught alongside other digital skills. "Digital literacy is often lacking in the security world when it comes to encryption. Of course most know that an encryption algorithm encodes a plaintext human readable version of text into what looks like random gibberish but that is not the whole story. What people need to be educated on is that encryption alone is not enough. What one needs to pay close attention to is: who does the encryption and who controls the access to the decryption key. Without understanding that you can be tricked into having a false sense of security by anyone claiming "don't worry your information is encrypted"

Coding is cool spread the word

Raising awareness of coding among the nation's youth is important to creating a talented workforce, explains Puppet's VP and MD EMEA, Marianna Calder. "We need to encourage more people and especially kids to get into coding and that means showing that it's cool to code. It is cool to code because of the creativity involved."

"With coding, there are many ways to solve the same problem. It allows you to be creative and individual, while still being technical. One of the best bits for is that there isn't a 'right way' of doing things it's always open to interpretation to find your own solution to the problem."

"At Puppet, we know that being able to code can open doors for people. That's why we participate in initiatives aiming to teach coding to groups such as military veterans, disadvantaged youth and girls. It's all part of our drive to grow and support opportunities for underrepresented groups in STEM careers."

Hyve Managed Hosting's director, Jon Lucas, thinks that making an effort to encourage coding now will benefit the UK in the long-run. "With uncertainty surrounding Brexit and the available pool of skilled workers, the need to nurture home-grown talent is becoming even more of a necessity."

"But that's just the start of the process and organisations with an interest in coding need to make a deeper commitment to the development of the overall talent pool. Initiatives such as codebar, for example, aim to increase coding learning and development opportunities across a more diverse range of people, and businesses should embrace the opportunities this offers to build their own teams, skillsets and expertise."

Liam Butler, area vice president at SumTotal, a Skillsoft company, says the changing digital landscape is creating opportunities for those with the right skills."Evolving technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can process and analyse huge volumes of data, far more efficiently and accurately than humans ever could. Automation in this way is poised to have a significant impact on jobs, salaries and careers. We are already seeing an evolving digital skills gap and this is only poised to increase."

"While some current jobs roles will disappear, many new roles are beginning to emerge. We know now that skills in areas such as computer programming, data science, mathematics, software architecture and engineering will be in demand, so developing knowledge, skills and competencies in these areas should be a priority."

"Organisations need to encourage their people to develop skills in these areas. Empowering business leaders to review their team's competencies and identify gaps related to skills or experience that will impact their ability to fill roles in the next three to five years is a good place to start. This will enable them to build a capability map detailing vital foundational skills, which they can then use to design new career pathways and training programmes."

One certainty is that businesses will continue to need employees with technical expertise for many years. Organisations that learn to train employees to code, or hire technically minded candidates from the outset, will best reap the benefits of industry disrupting technologies.