Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Digital Jobs for National Careers Week
This week it’s
National Careers Week! The aim of this week is to provide insight and guidance
into career choices.
National Careers week is aimed both at young
people at an important stage in their academic life but also aims to offer
information and advice to people of all ages who are considering a career change.
For this year’s careers week, we’ve put together a post on a range of digital
jobs, which we’re hoping will make students aware of some of the jobs that I
was never told about in school.
I don’t know about you, but in high school, I
was always being told that the best jobs were professions such as lawyers,
accountants, doctors and nurses. However, recently I have discovered that there
is a whole host of jobs that I would never have imagined existed. Would it
surprise you to know that the majority of schools don’t teach about the digital
industry? It should, especially given that the digital sector is one of the
fastest growing industries in the UK at the moment – but what is it?
The digital sector refers to any job
which is related to working online. From web developer to professional blogger,
the digital sector is extremely diverse. We’re certainly living in the digital
age and with this comes many opportunities.
We’re beginning to see more jobs being
introduced, and in many cases, jobs that were unheard of when I was at school.
Here are 5 examples of jobs that I wish I was told about earlier…
Video Game Tester
If your dream job is playing video games all
day long, this is the job for you. Software companies are always looking for
gamers who are willing to put their joystick to use by testing brand new
products before they hit the market and make notes of any problems – from
coding errors to typos.
YouTube Star
Imagine earning over £1m a year by doing
something you already love doing – like makeup or fashion. That’s essentially
what Zoe Sugg does with her super-popular YouTube channel, Zoella, where she
shares everything from her everyday life to makeup tutorials. CelebsNow estimates that she earns almost £4m per year combining
her YouTube channel, blog, books and beauty & lifestyle products.
Being a personality on a video hosting site
seems like an odd career. A YouTube star falls under the ‘content creator’
spectrum and it’s rather new, so I understand that for generations who weren’t
born with technology, it can be quite confusing and a bit baffling.
Social Media Manager
I’ve got some good news for all you social
media gurus – you can now spend your day liaising on Facebook and Twitter and
get paid to do so. Okay, it’s definitely not as easy as that, but who would
have thought that you could now make a career out of your favourite hobby?
Social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn have
experienced an explosion in popularity in the last few years. Companies who
want to influence using social media work with social media managers to create
an online brand identity. Unlike traditional marketing, social media involves
two-way communication between organisations and possible customers. Social
media is used to build a company’s brand and to increase website traffic. The
significance of social media has only been recognised in the past few years
and, luckily for those within digital, has brought with it plenty of jobs.
Blogger
Blogs have been around for years in some
shape or form. While they originally started out as online diaries, blogs have
recently grown in popularity and began gaining a much wider readership. It was
just a few years ago that blogging as a job was relatively unheard of. It can
be hard to break the mould and turn your hobby into an income but it’s been
done many times. Take Pixiwoo for example –they were actually one of the 10
best UK blogs of 2016, with 500k views per month. Pixiwoo is an extreme example
but they’re by far not the only ones who have made it in blogging. Others
include Zoella, Tanya Burr, Victoria Magrath, Lily Pebbles and Lydia Elise
Millen.
Professional bloggers create posts that may
be informational, editorial or commercial. Blogs are also used by websites to
help produce income from advertising. Even though traditional jobs in print
journalism are dwindling, the opportunities for bloggers are growing rapidly.
App Designer/Developer
Mobile apps haven’t been around for long, the
iOS App Store has only been in existence since 2008. This has brought lots of
new jobs into the digital economy. Mobile apps are becoming more and more
common and smartphone users are downloading them more regularly. App
designers have the exciting challenge of designing the graphics for new apps
and app updates to add to the already astounding amount across the Apple and
Android stores.
The collaboration between an app designer and
an app developer is what produces the apps everyone uses on their phone. Once
the app designer has finished their work, they will send everything off to the
app developer who is able to implement the design into code. The developer
takes the designs and makes the app do what it’s meant to do – so everything
behind the scenes that you don’t see – but this is what allows everyone to use
every feature of every app.
So, there you have it. 5 digital jobs that I
didn’t know existed at school. Without a doubt, we have all become accustomed
to the digital age quite quickly so it’s shocking to think that these jobs,
providing so much to our economy, are relatively new. Nevertheless, they are
definitely here to stay and are all possible paths to pursue.
Are you involved in National Careers Week
this week? Why not take this as an opportunity to make students aware of jobs
that they may not know exists? Make sure you get tweeting using the hashtag
#NCW2017 to let us know what you are doing to make the younger generation fully
aware of the variety of jobs that are available to them.
Together we will make a difference by helping young people leaving education.
JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.
Kyria Bush Jobhop.co.uk
- Career