Career and coding questions

Hello world.

I want to learn coding and I’d like to use these skills to seek work in Europe, I’m from Britain.

From what I know depending on what job you do and specialty you want to pursue can determine what type of code you learn. So I understand my questions are ‘how long is a piece of string’.

What codes (e.g python, c++ etc) are most common or sought after? What practices (e.g such as data science or app development) is most sort after.
I read Data Scientist and Data Analysis are sought after and interest me.

What coding qualifications, certificates and courses are recognised?

I see websites such as coursera and edu. Are they respected?

What’s recognised around the world? Will some courses look better based on where you could end up working?

Advice on building a portfolio and developing apps/scripts to show what you’re capable of.

Working for free to show my skills?

Just a few questions that came to mind. I have paid leave to take soon so it could be a good opportunity to learn.

Thank you and sorry if these questions have been asked before.

This can be extremely regional. I recommend looking at job postings in the city you want to live in. Although I’ve found web technology jobs to be fairly ubiquitous in the locations I’ve personally researched, I’ve also seen that some cities lean heavily toward certain industries.

In most places, only university degrees are formally recognized. There are also certifications that are created by private companies for their tools (such as Amazon offering certificates in AWS toolchains). Some countries may offer standardized non-university programs or standardized testing (there was recently a thread on the forum about apprenticeship programs in Britain that might be worth looking at). Unless a course specifically says that it has an accreditation in a given country, consider it purely for education, not for certification.

There are some really good courses on those platforms that can be extremely helpful in teaching yourself a skill. There are some pretty crappy courses too.

Degrees and/or practical experience.

Not in my experience.

Focus on building projects that build those skills to a professional level. A prospective employer or interviewer might take a quick look at a project or two, but you’re really going to be hired based on the interview process. If you can talk about what you’ve learned from your experience and demonstrate strong coding skills, then it does not matter what kind of project examples you do or don’t have.

If you mean contributing to open source projects in your free time, then that is a really good way to build professionally relevant skills.

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