Employee turnover is expensive, time consuming and stressful. But the need for new skills, whether to bolster your existing sales and services or to usher your company into emerging markets, is a constant. You already have excellent employees that “know the ropes” of your business but they don’t always have the skills needed to take those next steps. These employees may be called “power users” or “business analysts”. This is where upskilling comes in, giving rise to the age of the citizen developer. The citizen developer is able to use low-code and rapid application development tools to make apps that improve efficiency or more easily collect or gather data that can benefit the company.
Encouraging and even educating your employees to become citizen developers doesn’t mean eliminating the IT department, it means improving productivity and efficiency with collaboration and innovation. After all, who better to say exactly what the marketing or sales department needs in an app, tool or automation than the department members who will utilize it the most?
This is where Xojo comes in. Our long history (over 20 years) as an easy-to-use, rapid application development tool makes Xojo an ideal choice for would-be citizen developers.
Because Xojo is a single tool and language that makes a wide variety of apps, it’s easier for business and its citizen developers to learn and use. Does your organization need web apps, mobile apps, or desktop apps? Xojo can do all that. What about databases? Sure, Xojo can connect to most database servers including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server to work with your existing data. Plus Xojo also supports SQLite, one of the most popular databases in the world, and you can even use ODBC to connect to most anything else.
Employees that understand the business and can make their own apps as needed are tremendously valuable, which is why there is so much traction in the citizen developer space. In fact, most Xojo customers consider themselves to be citizen developers, often referring to Xojo as their secret weapon.
How can you upskill your employees to get them on the path to becoming citizen developers? First, identify those interested in learning more. Have them download Xojo for free and start looking at the many free resources that are available.