A blue collar job is one that is considered the more common hourly wage position in the work force. For decades, blue collar jobs were in construction, manufacturing, maintenance, retail, and other professions where their labor force dominated the employment environment. But as the United States watches its economy transition from manufacturing to information, some people are starting to wonder if website coding is becoming the next blue collar job.
The blue collar workforce does what is considered the daily grind work for the entire economy. These are people who are respected for “packing a lunch” and “doing a hard day’s work.” It is estimated that the web coding workforce will grow 15 percent between 2016 and 2026, which is faster than any other occupation in the United States. That will put the total number of website coders in the United States at around 190,000 by 2026, and that is a big percentage of the workforce.
One of the big reasons for the growth in website coding positions is the rapid growth in mobile computing. It is estimated that in 2017 the percentage of people accessing the Internet through their phones was 50 percent. That number steadily grows year after year, and that is fueling the need for more mobile websites. As the number of people accessing the Internet through smartphones grows, so will the number of website coders.
Just like construction companies have engineers who run the cranes and plumbers, the blue collar website coding workforce also has its specialists. Website coding requires experts in ecommerce, security, data gathering, language translation, and a variety of other fields that are all essential in keeping the Internet going. These are the people who are making website coding into blue collar work, and their numbers keep growing.
One of the reasons blue collar work was so popular during the industrial revolution and beyond is because it offered high pay to people who had limited educations. Anyone with an aptitude for computers can learn to code, but the median pay in 2017 was $67,990.00 per year, which is a pay rate similar to that of the other blue collar positions.
The biggest difference between website coders and other blue collar workers is that coders need a college degree of some kind to attract clients. Construction workers can rise through the ranks from the laborer position and get the specific training they need to get promoted. But most customers expect their website coders to be college educated, which is not something that is required of the other blue collar positions.
As the website coder workforce grows, so does its prominence in the American economy. One of the reasons website coding attracts so many workers is that it can be a high-paying job that can be done from home. A large number of coders work for companies as remote offices, and the ability to work from home is causing a lot of people to start taking up website coding.
With the new economy comes the new types of grinding jobs that are done for hours every day by a dedicated workforce. The website coder is quickly becoming part of the blue collar workforce, and there is a chance that coders could be the premier blue collar workers in the not-too-distant future.
