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Therefore you have the choice of spending up to four years doing a degree where they teach you out of date skills or you try to impress someone enough with your portfolio to employ you and hope your not just making tea for the next two years.
So is there another option?
When I left school in 1986 I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and looked at the options. In those days you either went to University or Polytechnic, got a job or ended up on the Youth Training Scheme or YTS. The YTS was a cut down version of the old fashioned apprenticeships, where you worked for a company and did a related qualification one day a week at a college.Although the YTS was not perfect and a large number of the people I know ended up after being on it without a job, at least the people coming out the end had useful qualifications and a real idea of how the working environment functioned.
The YTS is long dead, however the idea of apprenticeships, through the National Apprenticeship Service is alive and well.
These apprenticeships are aimed at the people 16 or over and is a different option to full time education.
While on the apprenticeship the employee earns from £95 per week and, as well as working for the company, they do work based, relevant training.
Each category of apprenticeship, such as ICT Professionals, which includes Software Development and Web Design, is graded. ICT Professional apprenticeships are classified as a Higher Apprenticeship and this grade of apprenticeships lead to qualifications such as the NVQ Level 4 or a foundation degree. This is the level of training that is required for a highly skilled industry, such as Web Design and would be a good grounding for anyone starting out in the business.
So why an apprenticeship?
There are a number of benefits for both employers and employees with apprenticeships.
For employees:
- You gain relevant training to your chosen career path.
- You earn money while learning
- You gain experience of the working environment
For the Employer:
- You approve the training plan and are able to make sure the training is relevant to your business
- Funding is available towards the training costs
- An apprentice are likely to be highly motivated
- It will be less of an overhead to employ an apprentice than a trained permanent employee
In Conclusion
The web is a young industry, and as such, we are lacking in the structure entry routes that exist for more established businesses, such as construction or architecture. These older industries have structured paths in, which leads to the people in the business having a uniform basic knowledge.
These education paths are under continuous revision from the industry organisations and as such, within the constraints of the higher education system, the things people learn tend to be up to date.
Setting up Chartered Institute of Internet Professionals is going a little to far just to make sure that the people coming into the business understand how to divide up structure and presentation within a web page. However, if more companies started running apprenticeships, and thereby started communicating with the educational establishments in their local area, the industry could start to influence what skills the designers and developers of tomorrow start out with.