Best Way to Transition into Development

Greetings, all!

I’m currently a Saitama-based English teacher thinking of transitioning to front-end development, already in the country with an Engineer Specialist in Humanities International Services status of residence. What programming languages are good to know? I know quite a bit of HTML and CSS plus a smattering of JavaScript, all of it self taught and still learning more. How much of a language should you know? Also, do employers here in Japan generally look for official qualifications or for a portfolio? I only have one rather simple JavaScript written myself. Thanks.

If you’re aiming front-end development them JavaScript is the language you definitely need to master.

That means at least get super familiar with the language itself, and popular basic libraries such as jQuery.

Now the tricky part: the JavaScript (and Node.js) community has many frameworks (Angular, Ember, and the recent React), and there’re even more coming each year. You might need to learn and be good at at least one of them, then be able to pivot to others if the projects/companies you work on/at require that.