…that weren’t mandatory a decade ago:
- Spanish
Sure, you can get a job at McDonalds without speaking Spanish— so long as you aren’t competing against a Spanish speaker. But how are you going to move up into management, if you can’t communicate with your Spanish-speaking employees and customers? - Web design
When was the last time you saw a business that didn’t have a website? Even if you only know enough to update a Drupal site with current photos, you can quickly make yourself invaluable to an employer who doesn’t have these skills. Plus you can navigate the modern world much more easily if you can tell the difference between a web browser and a website. (It’s important to know, for example, that not everything you type into a computer is seen by Google.) - Computer programming
At a minimum, if you can think like a computer, you can make sense of the world better than most. With all the predictions that computer programmers would be outsourced to India, it turns out there’s still a lot of demand here in the US— while young lawyers are getting outsourced to India. Indeed, the more we use computers, the more demand there is for someone local who can automate this and customize that. And most companies with a website could use a little JavaScript tweak here or a slight bit of custom PHP there— or at least a bit of guidance as to what’s easy to do and what’s hard.But it’s not not just about being a professional programmer; knowing how computers work makes you a better doctor, lawyer, salesperson, manager, artist, or independent business owner. Because in all those cases you’re going to be working with computers. Just like Spanish, you can add computer programming to any resume and possibilities open up.