While listening to the 200th Boagworld show the subject of how to get into web design/development came up. It seems to be a perpetual question, "do I go to University and get a degree or do I try and get a job and teach myself while working"?
The options now
From what was said by Chris Mills, who contributes to the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, and others a large number of the degrees and other courses available are not really up to date with current best practice. These courses are still often teaching table based layout and missing things like semantic HTML and accessibility.
This leads to students coming out at the end of a three or more year course with a large amount of debt and skills that would have been fine in 2000, but are somewhat lacking now.
Trying to get a job without higher qualifications has it's own issues, especially in the current economic climate. Web design companies tend to be small to medium sized business. They quite often don't have the time, money, culture or inclination to take on a person just out of school and let them learn on the job.
It takes a lot of resources to train up a member of staff and with the short amount of time a large number of us spend with any single employer, it can be seen as an expensive option for the agency.
Therefore you have the choice of spending up to four years doing a degree where they teach you out of date skills or you try to impress someone enough with your portfolio to employ you and hope your not just making tea for the next two years.
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