How To Become An Assistant Programmer: What It Is and Career Path

What is an assistant programmer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

2 min read

Quoted experts

Brian Glas,

Christian Hansen Ph.D.

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being an assistant programmer. For example, did you know that they make an average of $34.9 an hour? That's $72,588 a year! Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow -7% and produce -17,900 job opportunities across the U.S.

What general advice would you give to an assistant programmer?

Brian Glas

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Union University

Build relationships: Different technologies will interest and challenge you, but throughout your career, you'll find that it's the relationships that are the most important. This is harder to grasp earlier in your career, but much easier to understand after 15-20 years.
Gain different perspectives: Spend time with people in other roles that your job interacts with, and gain a solid understanding of how they view things; this is most valuable for career progression and understanding of how your work fits into the big picture.

ScoreAssistant ProgrammerUS Average

Salary

5.7

Avg. Salary $72,588

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

5.1

Growth rate -7%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

3.4

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.18%

Asian 21.11%

Black or African American 4.90%

Hispanic or Latino 8.65%

Unknown 4.67%

White 60.49%

Gender

female 28.89%

male 71.11%

Age - 48

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 48

Stress level

5.1

Stress level is manageable

7.1 - high

Complexity level

7.3

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

5.7

Work life balance is fair

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become an assistant programmer

Explore assistant programmer education requirements

Most common assistant programmer degrees

Bachelor's

67.1 %

Master's

14.0 %

Associate

9.9 %

Start to develop specific assistant programmer skills

Skills	Percentages
Data Entry	21.00%
C++	8.72%
HTML	6.57%
PL/SQL	6.15%
Python	4.11%

Complete relevant assistant programmer training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 1-3 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New assistant programmers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as an assistant programmer based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real assistant programmer resumes.

Research assistant programmer duties and responsibilities

Implement and automate existing manual process, to create CRF by creating new database objects in SQL and macro in excel.
Authore several critical ASP.NET web pages as part of ValueOptions EDI initiative.
Perform slight modifications to system as needed, such as for date calculations with SQL or modifying the GUI interface.
Refactore existing javascript code-base to more optimal server-side code-base.

Prepare your assistant programmer resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your assistant programmer resume.

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