Coding, says a former National Trust professional, is a little like knitting. “It’s like magic – you write some code, click a button and results just appear. It’s more creative than I realised,” explains Jen Openshaw, a history graduate who’s retrained to become a software engineer. Her career, while unusual, follows a pattern familiar to many who’ve leapfrogged into engineering and technology from an arts and humanities background.
But when an ill-judged government campaign back in 2020 suggested a ballet dancer’s next job was in cyber, it provoked scorn and ridicule, and the government thought best to scrap it. The UK needs its thinkers, artists and creatives as much as it does its engineers, data scientists and programmers – it’s just that today, tech careers appear better paid, more abundant and more flexible.
Technology was one of the sectors fastest to recover in 2021 in the wake of the pandemic, second only behind healthcare. The sector took...