Presenting my job as a front-end web developer on a primary school careers day

Last Friday, I had the priviledge of presenting my job as a front-end web developer to a class of year sixes for their careers day. It was a 20-minutes long Zoom call. I found it quite daunting as I don't normally communicate with children. Originally, I planned to present for 10 minutes and leave 10 minutes for Q & A, but my presentation ended up being only six minutes long! Thankfully, the students were very engaged and asked many great questions!

I started off my presentation on how I became to be a front-end web developer by sharing what I was like in primary school. My favourite subject was art and I liked drawing, making things, and wanted to be an artist, or an inventor.

I explained that I continued making things throughout secondary school and university. In secondary school, I learnt how to make things for people to use and about different materials, like wood, plastic, and metal.

At university, I learnt how to make things digitally and made my first portfolio website, which led to my interest in making things for the web. This led to my current role as a front-end web developer.

The hardest part of the presentation was explaining what a front-end web developer was in simple terms. Here's roughly how I explained it:

Web is short for the "world wide web" and is a collection of webpages found on the internet. (I got the definition from a BBC Bitesize Article about "What is the World Wide Web?")

Web Developer, simply put, is someone who makes things for the web.

Front-end Web Developer is someone who works on parts of the website that users can see, for example, buttons, navigation bar, and layout of the page.

At the end of the presentation, I explained what my day-to-day looked like, and the favourite part of my job.

Overall, although giving the presentation to a bunch of primary school students was outside of my comfort zone, I found it rewarding. I was really happy to see them be so engaged and curious, and am really glad I got the opportunity to present my job to them. Hopefully something that I have said would have inspired at least one person there!