I am sure we are all aware that the world we live in is constantly changing, but how well are you keeping up with this changing world? Failure to keep pace with our changing environment can make someone in any field or industry obsolete. Every single day that passes, a new invention is born.

Let’s talk about the way society now advertises their products and services. Irrespective of which industry you work in, if a company or industry does not advertise via social media, then they are already being left behind. In the past, companies spent fortunes sharing flyers, making banners, and sending marketers out on the streets to look for customers. That has significantly reduced now and has been overtaken by social media marketing. No wonder the president of the United States spends much of his time on Twitter, rather than giving press briefings.

At the backend, what drives and brought about the rise of social media? The simple answer is technology. What we see at the front-end of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, has several codes that make them work. A few months back, I was surprised to see that you can now charge your phone by two phones ‘kissing’ each other. I immediately said, ‘wow, technology’. In fact, countries spend billions of dollars each year investing in their defence force. Today, China might be saying they have made an invisible aeroplane, tomorrow Russia could be saying we have made an aeroplane that is faster than the speed of light, and the next day the USA is showing their new submarines. I believe in a few years from now we will have a commercial airline taking people into space or to the moon at a reduced cost, all in the name of technology.

If you carefully look at my earlier two points, you will observe that there is one key, underlining factor ties them together. In the education sector, I have observed that graduates who do not have a background in information technology now desire to learn computer programming. Why? Graduates are slowly realising that behind everything you see on the surface, there are millions of codes in the backend that make those things work. Let’s look at the weather reports that we constantly receive to notify us of impending danger, they are models, built with millions of codes running in the backend. In the research world, Professors now confirm their experimental works, observations, and assumptions with different existing models, which are also built with different programming languages such MATLAB, Python, C++, etc.

To conclude, if you want to be relevant in your area of expertise, please don’t be left behind by our ever dynamic world.

Written by Newman