7N: programmers start programming as early as primary school

Ten post dostępny jest także w języku: polski

Record number of computer science students at Polish universities

New technologies are advancing, and with them comes a growing interest in IT majors at Polish universities. According to Paweł Zdziech, Recruitment & Communication Manager at 7N, IT is the field that has been attracting the most interest in recent years. He cited data showing that as of the beginning of October over 18,000 students had begun or resumed studying IT.

In total, according to data from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, a record 32,680 people applied to study this profile, and there were almost 9 applicants per vacancy. The Central Statistical Office also in its report “Information Society in Poland” publishes data on graduates of computer science majors, which shows that in 2019 the direction of this profile graduated 13.5 thousand people.

A college education is necessary?

However, is a university degree necessary for the programming profession. According to Stack Overflow, a profile associating people from the IT industry around the world, only 23% of programmers have completed a master’s degree. The vast majority of 65,000 of the respondents completed only a bachelor’s degree or interrupted her studies. Moreover, only nearly two-thirds (62%) of the surveyed programmers studied in IT fields.

The programming stage starts much earlier. According to the same study, 70% of programmers wrote the first line of code before the age of 18, and exactly half before the age of 16. By country in the world, Polish programmers do even better, because they write their first programs at the average age of 14.

“An early start in IT is not necessary, but it helps. Although you can learn to program even in your thirties, the problem lies somewhere else. Being over thirty, you usually have much less time to explore the secrets of programming”. – assesses Paweł Zdziech

Experience is not important

The demand for employees with programming skills is huge, so even in the beginning, companies are choosing to hire people with little experience. Two-thirds of respondents have less than 10 years of work experience, with as many as 40% having less than 5 years.

Also analyzing the age of a programmer in the world, half of them are under 30 years old. The average age of such a person in the US is 33, in Poland 28 and in India 26.