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Word of the Day: warble
This word has appeared in 10 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
8 Exciting Tech Careers In E-commerce — & How To Get Them
There’s a pretty good chance that your inbox is overflowing with promotional emails about Black Friday sales from practically every retailer (Codecademy included!). With Cyber Week kicking off on Friday, ‘tis the season for online shopping.
It takes a lot of technical specialties and skills to build and maintain online shopping platforms and make it easy for customers to buy things, especially around shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Week.
“E-commerce” is short for electronic commerce, and it’s the term for buying and selling goods and services on the internet. Within e-commerce, there are a variety of opportunities for developers and coding enthusiasts to get a job in tech. From UX to project management, here’s an overview of the careers you can have in e-commerce, plus the courses to take to get hired.
Front-End Engineer
Just like a brick-and-mortar retailer would spruce up a storefront window to entice shoppers, e-commerce websites need Front-End Engineers to develop websites that are beautiful and functional. Front-End Engineers handle the parts of the website that customers will interact with the most, so they have an important role in e-commerce.
Front-End Engineers get to combine design and programming, and use the web development languages HTML/CSS and JavaScript extensively. You can learn the skills you need to get hired as a Front-End Engineer with Codecademy’s Front-End Engineer career path — you’ll even make portfolio projects that you can use to apply for jobs. While the career path will get you from beginner to job-ready, you can also check out all of our web development and web design courses to build out your front-end development knowledge.
Web Producer
Marketplace platforms that sell products from lots of different brands need people who can act as a liaison between the website and the merchant. The role of a Web Producer in e-commerce is to work with stakeholders to ensure that merchants are satisfied with the positioning and performance of their products on the site.
Although a Web Producer role might be less technical than other positions, these individuals need to know how to communicate with engineering teams. Want to learn how to think like a developer? Check out our beginner-friendly code foundations courses or jump in and start the free Learn How to Code course right now.
Business Analyst
A Business Analyst is a data analyst who works with business data to improve decision-making within an organization. A Business Analyst at a retailer would figure out ways that the company can maximize profits, streamline its processes, identify business goals, and plan strategically for the future.
Business Analysts use programming languages like Python, SQL, and R, as well as software like Microsoft Excel and Tableau to analyze data, build dashboards, and create impactful reports. Sound like your dream job? In the Codecademy career path Business Intelligence Data Analyst, you’ll learn all of the skills you need to start a career in data in a short amount of time.
To get a taste of another data job that involves e-commerce, read this blog about a Data Scientist at Shopify.
SEO Specialist
When you’re buying something online, you typically do some research first by Googling a product and seeing what comes up. Companies want their products and storefronts to show up in your search engine results, which is why they hire SEO Specialists. SEO or “search engine optimization” is all about improving a website so the content is findable on search engines like Google.
SEO Specialists use tools like Google Analytics to measure a site’s performance, and Microsoft Excel to keep track of data over time. They might also have a background in marketing or writing. If you want to work on your data skills, you might want to take our free course Principles of Data Literacy.
UX Designer
It’s standard for online retailers to have robust UX (short for “user experience”) teams — after all, shopping is an experience. Unlike browsing a store IRL, when you’re shopping online you can’t touch the products that you’re contemplating buying. UX teams help fill in that gap by making sure product pages have all of the information a customer needs to make a decision about whether or not to buy it.
Every “user” of an online store is a potential customer. A UX Designer anticipates a customer’s needs and decides how to lay out images or descriptions on a web page. Or, they might work with engineers to tweak the website so the shopping experience is more intuitive. All of these subtle adjustments make it so customers are more likely to add something to their cart.
If you want to become a UX Designer, it’s important to understand how to use design tools. In the course Introduction to UI and UX Design, you’ll learn some key UI/UX design principles and get to work with Figma, the industry-standard tool for wireframing and prototyping.
UX Researcher
Consumer behavior informs so many decisions in a retail business. A UX Researcher is someone who gets in the head of the user to identify their needs, motivations, and behaviors. UX Researchers then take their findings and come up with solutions that make a website or app easier to use.
There are a variety of research methods that UX Researchers use to understand users and uncover pain points. In the free course Learn User Research: Generative, you’ll learn how to conduct a popular UX research method, analyze your findings, and create a report. You can learn another valuable UX research skill, and get practice using the well-known visual collaboration platform Miro, in the free course Learn Design Thinking: Ideation.
Project Manager
A Project Manager in software development shepherds a project — like a new application or feature — from start to finish. Project Managers need to be good communicators, problem-solvers, and decision-makers, although they usually aren’t writing code.
The role of a Project Manager in e-commerce is a lot like any Project Manager position in web development. For example, a Project Manager might help a dev team enhance a website for shopping events like Black Friday. They would handle everything from time management and deadlines to budgeting and risk management.
If you’re preparing for a Project Manager job interview, here are 25 interview questions to practice answering.
IT Manager
If you’re thinking about a career in tech, don’t write off IT (short for “information technology”) as an option. As Kofi Friar, Senior IT Manager at Codecademy, described the field: IT is “making sure technology is working together.” IT touches every industry, including fashion and retail. Curious what it’s like to be an IT Manager at a major retailer? Check out this interview with the Senior IT Manager with URBN, the parent company of Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, and more.
You can learn the skills you need to work in IT with our free course Introduction to IT. Be sure to read this blog about the entry-level IT jobs you’ll be able to apply for soon. Or dream big by exploring the highest-paying IT jobs, according to the 2022 Skillsoft IT Skills & Salary report.
When you have technical skills, all kinds of opportunities open up to you. Check out these blogs to read more stories about people with unique and cool jobs in tech. Take a look at our full course catalog to start learning to code today. We have lots of free coding courses you can take with a free Codecademy account — and save your money for other holiday shopping needs.
Catalog Home | Codecademy
If you’re not sure where to begin or what to learn next, this is a great place to start. Check out our top coding courses, Skill Paths, and Career Paths.
Will You Be Watching the 2022 World Cup?
To get the big picture, however, start with “A Contentious World Cup,” a conversation between Lauren Jackson, a writer for the newsletter The Morning, and Tariq Panja, a sports reporter for The Times. Here are some excerpts:
Lauren: I grew up in Arkansas, where we watched a different kind of football. Can you give me a sense of how big the World Cup is globally?
Tariq: There’s nothing bigger than this, not even the Olympics. The World Cup is the most watched event in the world. It happens every four years, and it’s a highlight of many people’s lives.
These 32 teams capture the imagination of supporters even outside their borders, particularly in Asia, where most countries historically do not qualify for the World Cup. People may adopt a team and support them with a fervent passion.
This is the fourth World Cup you’ve covered. What is different about this one?
This is the first time that the games are being played in November and December. Because of the desert heat in Qatar, the schedule had to be changed, upending the entire global soccer calendar. European soccer, for the first time, has been paused halfway through the season. Players now have less time to train with their national teams.
These games have normally been held in different cities across huge countries, like Russia, Brazil or South Africa. This is the smallest location ever to host this tournament.
In 2009, Qatar put forward the most extravagant bid in history to host the World Cup. Why did it want to host so badly?
Qatar is a tiny speck in the Gulf desert wanting the world to know it’s here. It’s the first Arab and first Muslim nation to host a sporting event of this size. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are looking on enviously, giving Qatar clout.
In 2009, Qatar spent tens of millions of dollars to try to host the World Cup. They paid famous athletes like Zinedine Zidane, one of the best players in history, to support their bid. Still, Qatar’s bid seemed like a joke. It was so outlandish as a concept. They were getting questions about the heat, about how they could fit the games in a country smaller than Connecticut and whether they would allow alcohol.
When FIFA’s president at the time opened the envelope and Qatar’s name came out, immediately everyone zeroed in on corruption. The investigations that followed forced FIFA to change the way it designated a host, and revealed how a country was able to bend the world to its will through force of cash.
The article continues:
How has Qatar pulled off its preparation? Talk us through the controversy surrounding this tournament.
They essentially had to rebuild an entire country in 12 years to host this one-month event. They amassed hundreds of thousands of overseas workers, particularly South Asian workers, to do this construction. Thousands of those workers have died in Qatar since 2010, the year the country won hosting rights, according to human rights groups. Many more were injured building or refurbishing these eight air-conditioned stadiums, which Qatar will have little use for after the World Cup. It’s been a collision of some of the world’s poorest people with the ambition of some of the world’s richest people.
The country’s human rights record has been under scrutiny beyond the worker deaths. One key aspect of that is Qatar’s criminalization of homosexuality. The World Cup is supposed to be this festival open to everyone. How does that square with a country that would jail you for being gay?
FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, pushed back against the outrage yesterday, calling it “hypocrisy” from European countries. He asked fans to criticize him instead of Qatar.
Some European soccer fans are calling for people to boycott watching the games. What would you tell someone weighing that decision?
It’s a conversation people are having all over the world, and it speaks to the troubling nature of this tournament. It’s for each individual to figure that out for themselves. But from the players’ perspectives, this isn’t their fault. It’s the position FIFA has placed them in.
Ultimately, though, this tournament could be held on the moon, and it would attract the same number of eyeballs. Soon, most of the world is only going to be talking about what the matchups look like.
If you’d like to learn more, here are a few questions that recent Times reporting has addressed:
Students, read the one of the articles in The Times’s extensive coverage of the tournament, and then tell us:
Are you a sports fan? Do you love soccer? Will you be watching the 2022 World Cup in Qatar?
If so, which team will you be rooting for? Which players and matchups are you most looking forward to watching? Do you have a favorite memory from a past World Cup?
Were you already familiar with some of the issues surrounding the 2022 World Cup? Which ones interest you most? Why?
Advocacy groups have criticized Qatar’s human rights record, including laws criminalizing homosexuality and restricting free speech. However, in a guest essay, the historian Abdullah Al-Arian argues that the World Cup belongs in the Middle East. Do you think Qatar should be hosting the 2022 tournament? Why or why not?
The Times writes that the decision to take the World Cup to Qatar has “upturned a small nation, battered the reputation of global soccer’s governing body and altered the fabric of the sport.” Do you believe that the 2022 games have hurt the reputations of FIFA and the sport itself?
Make some bold predictions: Who will win the World Cup? Who will be the breakout stars of the tournament?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
Word of the Day: luminary
This word has appeared in 62 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
10 Prompts for Talking and Writing About Thanksgiving
What are your Turkey Day traditions? What are you grateful for this year? What is your favorite Thanksgiving memory? And more.
