National volunteering week started on the first of June. The team here at DigitalLabs have a long history of volunteering and between us we have organised events, including hackathons and conferences; contributed to Open Source communities; and taught programming to young people through CoderDojo and CodeClub. Volunteering is one of the ways that digital professionals can help to support people entering our industry and it can also be a chance for us, as individuals, to learn more, expand our networks and give back to the communities that have supported us.
Recently I went along to Stockport Grammar School’s Cafe Sci to talk to a group of their students about coding and how it fits into business marketing. The Cafe Sci events bring external speakers into school to discuss areas of their work and answer questions. I was invited due to my role as a STEMNET Ambassador, which are volunteers that take part in activities to showcase science, technology, engineering or maths to young people. By showing them the value of these fields in our lives and particularly our careers, we hope to increase their engagement and encourage young people to study relevant subjects and consider careers in STEM fields.
I did a short talk which included brief elements of HTML5, CSS, Digital Marketing, On Page SEO and Accessibility. 20 minutes is not enough time to teach a group of students a great deal about coding or business marketing, but the idea was to give them a small amount of information with the key message being that what you write in your code affects how successful the site is. During the talk I included the demonstration of a very simple and deliberately ugly website, made up of a few lines of simple HTML5 with a basic CSS stylesheet. The point of the demonstration was primarily to show that by editing a few lines of code in an editor, that the look of a website can be changed and also linked into an explanation of how visual design choices like background and font colours can affect how easy it is for people to read the content and how this is important for accessibility. Having a website is commonly accepted as a requirement for marketing any business, but long before small businesses were spending their money on Google Ads and boosted Facebook posts, they were spending it on entries in printed telephone directories like Yellow Pages. Very few high school students, and certainly none that attended the talk, would consider hunting for a copy of a printed directory and searching for a business and I was able to use my former retail business to give examples of how things have changed. The owners of Yellow Pages, where I placed my ad in 2007 have recently ceased printing hard copy directories in favour of a free online version. Failing to be online, or being online and not being displayed to prospective customers, means that some companies are simply invisible to their target market.
Sharing knowledge is not the only positive element of giving presentations to groups of school students, it can also be a chance to improve outcomes and experiences for those that come after us. It is very obvious to us here in DigitalLabs during our taught lectures and workshops, that there is a significant gender gap in our current cohort of computer science students. Junior schools running after school coding clubs through Code Club report that 40% of their attendees are girls, which shows that an interest in coding is far less gendered in primary school. Realistically the best way to ensure that more women study tech subjects at university, is by encouraging more of them to study tech subjects at high school and college.
Volunteering is one of the ways that digital professionals can support young people entering our profession and is also an opportunity to encourage diversity and show people, particularly young people, that a career in technology is open to anyone. Whilst I don’t neccessarily agree that everyone needs to know how to code, I strongly believe that everybody should have the opportunity to learn and that nobody should be discouraged through a belief that only certain types of people can pursue a career in this field.