Coding is one of the most important skills to have in finance;

There are many other articles saying this in one way or another, a simple Google search will show that. Why am I pushing out another one?

Because it is needed.

I see many people, especially business students, who still think they don't need to learn to code (same thing with math, but I'll make that another post...or 50). Well, that's complete nonsense. My experiences alone prove otherwise.

Internship #1: As a young intern, I became the Excel VBA and automation guru of the main office of a publicly-traded insurance company full of actuaries and other people already proficient in Excel. I completed major projects that lead to immediate results for the company. They would have kept me around as long as I wanted, but classes and extracurricular activities got in the way.

Internship #2: I became the Excel VBA and automation guru (...sound familiar?) of a division of one of the largest international manufacturing companies in the world. The Excel automation projects I completed saved the financial analysts several hours of manual work during monthly reporting. I also completely remade the product pricing model using Excel, which would directly impact profitability. Since leaving, this company has asked me multiple times to return in a couple of different roles.

Extra Project #1: I was part of a team working with a group of financial advisors who had little coding ability, but found themselves in need of a few automated tasks and other things that required programming knowledge to get done. Can't speak much about this one due to NDA, but knowing the R language was a big plus.

Extra Project #2: I scored a contracting/consulting gig as a freelance programmer with another financial advisor. Much like the above project, this advisor needed someone who understood finance, but could work with languages like Excel VBA and R.

Obviously, not everyone will have these experiences like these....but they could if they knew how to code. Coding in finance is not just limited to high frequency trading, hedge funds, prop shops, and investment banks. I encountered it first-hand in insurance, manufacturing, and financial advising. Because I knew how to do it when others didn't, I had an advantage. Is it possible to get a job without this knowledge? Yes, but you better have something else about you that stands out.

It may not be necessary to put in the time to become an expert programmer, but being at least somewhat well-versed in something like Excel VBA, R, or SPSS doesn't take much time and has many benefits. More complicated projects may require an object-oriented language like C++, C#, or Java. To deal with the core issues, randomness and uncertainty, knowing a programming language is key.

To make it easier and put my suggestions out there, if I was starting from scratch and wanted to learn one of these languages, I'd learn R. Why? Because it is free, open-source, used by millions of statistical professionals, and has thousands of add-in packages available. I use Rstudio, which is a great and painless way to work with R. I've written a short-and-sweet guide to help you Get Started in R.