Industry in the United States has stalled considerably recently. While unemployment is not very high, underemployment is. While the country is currently clawing its way out of a large recession, many young people can still only find jobs which don’t fully utilize the skills they developed in college.  Sometimes, those that didn’t go to college find themselves in a better financial situation later in life without the
burden of student loans.  Obviously, this only happens if a high school graduate finds a profitable skill-based trade which suits her as a career. However, these jobs can be difficult to find as a large portion of traditional American industry has been outsourced in the last few decades. Everyone has it rough. The number of people competing for each job continues to increase, and we’re less and less likely to get promoted at the jobs we work in.

So what is America good at? It turns out, we’re pretty good at moving money around, maintaining a large military, and, we’re really good at making computers work. Like other manufacturing, much of the
building of smartphones, computers, tablets, and their requisite component parts is done in other countries. So what do we do? We write the code. Despite falling math and science scores nationwide,
the United States is still the center of influential and groundbreaking software, video games, websites, and algorithms. That’s odd, because we don’t teach kids much about computers in public schools. Often, only those with an odd predilection for computers ever delve into coding. Those that do, and learn to master a coding language or two, find that they have a marketable skill, independent of how well they happened to do in school. So, teach your kids to code, whether or not you can. It will be the best gift you ever give them. A vast majority of the world economy in the quickly approaching future, and from then on, will be driven by computer code. Teach yourself if you don’t know already. There are free websites, and paid tutors you can take advantage of as an adult. Even if it isn’t directly relevant to your current career, I guarantee it will help your resume in the future.