App creation driving job growth and students are eager to get involved

When Melanie Ehrenkranza began studying journalism in 2008, she anticipated a rigorous curriculum filled with writing.

An explosion of social media and mobile apps quickly changed her perspective, however, and the San Diego State senior soon realized she needed to focus on building technical skills.

Ehrenkranza is now part of an interdisciplinary class effort between journalism and computer science students at SDSU to develop a mobile news app to serve the university and its surrounding communities.

Being knowledgeable in programming has become a smart investment for college students of all disciplines as they enter the workforce. Within the past five years, the demand for apps has created 466,000 jobs in the United States according to an analysis by technology trade group TechNet.

This growth is “only the tip of the iceberg,” said Amy Schmitz-Weiss, assistant professor at SDSU’s School of Journalism and Media Studies.

“It’s such a competitive market now and there’s such a demand to know how to do everything,” SDSU journalism senior Beth Edlerkin said. “Organizations are hiring outside companies to create apps and then hiring people to manage them. If you have those skill sets, you can tell the employer ‘you don’t have to outsource that: I can do it for you and keep it updated.’”

Senior journalism major Sandy Coronilla feels the opportunity to practice building an app in Schmitz Weiss’ course is extremely relevant because consumers are increasingly seeking information in non-traditional formats — an observation backed up by holiday sales data for tablet computers.

Schmitz-Weiss’ course is using Ushahidi, an open source software. Having access to framework already set by such software opens the platform and technology for individuals to build on or modify shared codes, which encourages program improvement, she said. And everyone should try it, not just coding junkies.

“I knew nothing going into the class and I’m learning a lot about what it takes,” Ehrenkranza said. “You have to start somewhere.”

For those interested in learning to program, there are online resources to help get started. More than 390,000 people have signed up to learn how to code in 2012 through weekly interactive lessons with Codecademy, a website created by Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims.

“We think programming is 21st century literacy,” Sims wrote. “Everyone uses mobile phones, computers, and cloud services, but they have almost no awareness about how these things work. Knowing even the slightest bit of programming can help you automate smaller pieces of your job and place the rest of your electronic life in context.”

Holly Pablo is Spring 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.