Roadmap to Success: Preparing Your Child for a Career in Technology

Curiosity is inevitable in children, and trying to suppress that natural yearning for knowledge is more often than not the wrong decision. There is a very real dichotomy of risk and benefit to technology: it may serve as a tool to open up the world to someone, yet it can inadvertently shut a person out of the world. As parents raise their children in a technologically-savvy culture, they must learn to balance their children’s exposure. On the one hand, barring your child from all devices until they are twenty years old will certainly hinder them. On the other hand, permitting them to play video games all day is certainly not healthy either.

If your child is taking up more than a passing interest in technology, there are many ways to foster that insatiable curiosity through education. There are many steps a young person can take to prepare themselves for a career in technology. Allow me to share four lessons I have personally learned that helped me secure some amazing opportunities within the tech space (without even having a college degree!).

First, make learning the objective. In doing so, you’ve made it so you can’t lose. Your child may pursue many different vocational paths with technology that can take him or her down many different routes. I’m so thankful that my parents let me explore all of the options available to me before I settled on one. Because I learned about the tech space as a whole throughout the process, spending a year doing something different from my current career was still worth it.

Making learning fun for a child may seem impossible, but there are so many resources available to do just that. Using free courses on Khan Academy to build basic HTML websites at twelve years old gave me the foundational knowledge to help me make my first income online. Learning how to build silly games on scratch.mit.edu later empowered me to create systems for my employer. Taking apart hard drives when I could barely turn a screwdriver created a strong knowledge of hardware that let me later earn a side income with IT. Although your child may bounce around a bit, they will always win when learning is the objective.

It should be noted here that if learning is the objective, money will not be the priority (at least in the beginning). I got my first internship because I told a classmate’s father I would work for free if he gave me a chance. That foot-in-the-door led to getting professional references and gave me the confidence to ask for my next high-paying, much more impressive internship. Even though technology moves fast, careers still need the long game to be played.

Second, help your child to build skills and share them with others. These two should go hand in hand. Building skills can be through projects or “gig” work. If you’ve followed step one and made learning the goal, then hopefully your child is willing to go out of their comfort zone a little bit. I often took up tasks I did not fully understand knowing that to complete the task I would need to learn quite a bit.

After your child has explored different tech fields, they will probably find one that resonates with them. If it’s website development, you can ask people at your church or co-op if they need any work done to create or maintain their webpage. If it’s digital marketing, you can ask around to see if anyone in the field would be open to being shadowed for a time.

A career in a technology field likely means your child will need to “sell” themselves as a person. This will require your child to reach out to people in their life. For instance, my first website development client was a friend of my youth group leader who heard I did some work in that industry. The first copywriting I did was for my friend’s mother! All of it starts with building various skills and being able to jump into available opportunities. If I didn’t know how to make a website, I would have had to say no, and that’s another opportunity to learn and gain experience that I would have lost.

The third lesson that your child should strive for is to share their skills. There came a point in my life where I had learned many facets of technology due to my interest in it. I had learned enough that when people asked me questions I could either answer their query or direct them to the right source. (This was always for free!)

Sharing skills is one of the most important steps because it requires two things from your child: mastering the skills themselves and knowing them well enough that they can communicate them clearly to others. Many qualified people have been passed over in their field because they could not clearly articulate their impressive abilities.

I also encourage young people to have a presence on LinkedIn. Although social media can often be a waste of time, networking is still massively important. LinkedIn is a social networking app/website that encourages users to post business/marketing/technology-related information to share with others in your network. It can also substitute for a resume, showing work experience, educational background, and even references. The position I currently hold can be attributed to growing my LinkedIn from a young age and focusing on providing professional value. It meant I had to learn skills and also learn how to share those skills with others. LinkedIn provided yet another way to share the skills I had worked so hard to learn with others.

Finally, prepare your child to future-proof their career. It will be so much harder for your child to work in technology if they do not see an iPhone until they are 17. However, there are still ways to learn some skills that nearly every tech career will require. Learning how to use Gmail, Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel proved invaluable as they are frequently-used tools in my career. Learning to use simple apps like these can propel your child a long way.

Currently, many people do not appreciate what Artificial Intelligence (AI) means to the workforce. AI will be one of the biggest movers in the tech industry in the coming years. Learning some AI skills will give your child a head start on productivity and an increase in salary, so learning the basics of ChatGPT and machine learning will prove invaluable as they grow their overall tech skillset.

In the end, we want our children to always be learning. Many other industries seem to have reached a plateau in terms of skilled employees, but that is not true of technology. Tech jobs are often high-paying and are constantly needed in today’s society. I hope you can see how your child’s tech curiosity is one of the greatest gifts when entering this field. Help them learn the skills, build their knowledge, share it with others, and future-proof it all by continuously exploring the ever-evolving world of technology.

Asher Fogie

And no, AI did not write this. 🙂