Hindsite 20/20

[pathfinder74]

Juts occurred to me, and I don't know if anyone has ever recommended this to me in the past when I was going to school, but

You know what you want to do for a job... say web designer.
You want to know what you need to know to get a job in this field.
Check out various job postings on the online job search sites.

Pick out the common skills that most ask for:
HTML/XHTML
CSS
JavaScript

Secondary to this are:
Photoshop
QuarkExpress
Dreamweaver

These seem to be the top 3. After that I've been seeing:
ASP/PHP
XML
mySQL

Just thought I'd share this afterthought on how to prepare for a "career" in web design so at least someone can learn from my "mistake".

It would have been nice to have a college adviser who knew this sort of thing and could have told me what to focus on while I was wasting four years in college.

[scragar]

I'd say that strictly a designer won't need any of the bottom 3, it's far from the designers requirements.

A developer on the other hand would need the bottom three, but no skills in the middle 3, although I also belive CSS isn't high on a developers needs.

[Stephen Philbin]

The average requirements in job postings where I live tend to include a degree in computer science, at least 5 years commercial experience, "excellents skills with HTML, XHTML, XML, XSL, RSS, AJAX, Javascript, PHP, ASP classic, ASP.Net, MySQL, Windows, Linux" and so on. On top of the usually ridiculous list of skills, there's invariably also the requirement for strong customer service skills.

What makes it even worse is the fact that they expect you to cover the workload of about 3 different departments for a sallary that's about equal to that of the average full-time janitorial job.

Needless to say (although I am doing anyway :rolleyes:), most employers 'round these parts are small businesses that haven't got the slightest clue about what they actually need.

[pathfinder74]

Yeah... that laundry list is more often than not for a developer, but I've seen a lot of design positions with at least a few of those injected as well which alienates me 9/10 times.

Flash is another one. I have a general understand of the app and given enough refresher time I could get pretty good with it again but I generally have no use for it. Plus, I can't fly action script alone... I can do the "graphics" part of it, but the action I need help with... which usually seems to almost be expected that if you know Flash you know action script.

I see that as not much different than "if you know Illustrator you should know JavaScript".

[Stephen Philbin]

Ah. Excuse my ignorance. I tend not to make much of a distiction between "designer" and "developer", especially in the context of job listings. It's just the mentallity instilled in to me by this very subject: employment.

I tend to find that, in job listings, "developer" and "designer" are used interchangibly and have no real relevance to the position in question. They tend to just want everything (plus customer support, sales representative, technical support, marketing director and god knows what else).

I suppose Flash is a bit of a special case because of the inability to seperate the function from the form. It comes as a single object so it's expected that everything it should do can be constructed by a single person. I don't really know much about it myself; I avoid it like the plague, but I know about the ignorance of those that demand flash and the expectations placed on those that use it to any extent. I'm actually waiting to get around to studying SVG because, from the description of its purpose, it sounds like it should totally negate and supercede flash anyway.

I certainly know what you mean about feeling alienated too.I hate to say things that sound so big-headed as "I feel that I'm actually quite well rounded in my skill set", but I feel that it's true. I feel as if I have a good set of skills which I have spent years developing, but completely excluded from any hope of employment. I have focused a great deal on learning, but--with one single exception--I haven't actually built anything permanent. The only thing I have to show for my years of study is a very crappy site (stephenphilbin.com (http://www.stephenphilbin.com)), which, if cited as my only reference, would have me laughed out of an interview.

To be fair, I do tend to focus more on the technical aspects rather than the artistic aspects--in that I have the artistic tallents of a brick, but I just hate knowing there are a lot of people in well-paid jobs that don't have a clue, and then there's me with a decent level of competence and can't get a foot in.

Sorry for the rant by the way.

[Declan1991]

I hate to start nit-picking, but expertise in a program doesn't make you good at that part of the job. Saying I'm great at PhotoShop means nothing, being good at graphic design is what is relevant, whether you use PhotoShop, Inkscape, Gimp, GimpShop or any other free or paid program. The same goes for DreamWeaver or any other program.

Most of the acronyms mean nothing really, and people can be wowed by the full list, I'm too lazy to write my own, so I'll copy Stephen's.
HTML - no skill
XHTML - no skill, the same thing as HTML, and pointless anyway since you cannot serve pages as XHTML
CSS - needs practice to be done properly
XML - no skill
XSL - pretty specialized not much use for a web developer/designer
RSS - not too much, and plenty of open source code available
AJAX - JavaScript plus a few more letter, very basic
JavaScript - real language, but probably underestimated because its not understood
PHP, ASP classic, ASP.Net - real languages
MySQL - basics easy, always more to learn in optimisation
Windows, Linux - easy enough to be able to wow people.

My point kind of is that people don't have a clue what they want, and just throw every thing they can think of at the wall and hope some of it will stick. I think other people's ignorance is the hardest thing to cope with, not the individuals, that is, only talking about web development.

Another thing to contend with is people don't know what a good web developer is. They think that a good web developer will get a flashy (excuse the pun) site working on the browser they look at the web in, on their operating system, and don't understand accessibility checks, validated code, optimisation, cross-browser testing and all the other things that go into making a web developer good, and who can blame them: a lot of developers don't either (totally disable JavaScript and the web is not a fun place to be)? It's like the pharmacist, the patient just wants plenty of drugs quickly, while the pharmacist has to make sure the patient is getting the proper amount, they won't have any bad side effects and that they will treat the actual disease; what the patient thinks is a good pharmacist is actually the bad pharmacist.

The client is impressed by HTML, XHTML, CSS and AJAX (and who wouldn't be in fairness), but all together, they amount to nothing (except HTML and CSS in tandem) and AJAX means nothing without JavaScript, and if not properly implemented, can cause the site to break. Sorry for having a bit of a rant especially since I went pretty close to straying off topic.

[scragar]

Most of the acronyms mean nothing really, and people can be wowed by the full list, I'm too lazy to write my own, so I'll copy Stephen's.
HTML - no skill
XHTML - no skill, the same thing as HTML, and pointless anyway since you cannot serve pages as XHTML
CSS - needs practice to be done properly
XML - no skill
XSL - pretty specialized not much use for a web developer/designer
RSS - not too much, and plenty of open source code available
AJAX - JavaScript plus a few more letter, very basic
JavaScript - real language, but probably underestimated because its not understood
PHP, ASP classic, ASP.Net - real languages
MySQL - basics easy, always more to learn in optimisation
Windows, Linux - easy enough to be able to wow people.
can I say I'm amazed to find my list it actualy quite full:

(X)HTML - yup
CSS - yup
XML - yup
XSL - never had need for it, but I have basic knowledge, just in case
RSS - yup
AJAX - yup
JavaScript - yup
PHP, perl, ASP classic - yup
ASP.Net - no, to be quite honest I'd rather not anyway, ASP is an annoyance, I can only imagine .NET being just as bad, if not worse(no offense intended to anyone who likes ASP, but I just don't like it, at all)
MySQL - yup, although I still have to look up the manual on creating relationships in the DB
Windows, Linux - can and do use both, I would much rather use linux though, windows is slow and buggy by comparison(and installing quanta via cygwin onto windows is not an option, it works, but I lose half of the features, like bash or perl plugins(if you run it in cygwin the plugin has to be an executable, go figure) and the middle click to paste, which make my work 100 times easier).

Having said that I am completely hopeless when it comes to the question of "does this look good?", I just can't answer it. Accessability? Yes, Functional? Yes, Appearance? No idea.

[pathfinder74]

XML is easy?

I thought is was a little more involved... writing DTD's and what not.
I'm not entirely sure what I need to know it for...

[Stephen Philbin]

Sorry for having a bit of a rant especially since I went pretty close to straying off topic.

Hey it's good to know I'm not the only one that thinks the same thing.

XML is easy?

XML is as simple or complex as you make it. That's one of the great things about XML. The vast majority of the time that XML is used, only a comparatively simple subset of the XML 1.0 Recommendation is actually put to use. However, if you start trying some of the more interesting stuff (DTD/Schema, namespaces, XSL etc.), XML can get pretty complex very quickly.

[Declan1991]

XML is as simple or complex as you make it. That's one of the great things about XML. The vast majority of the time that XML is used, only a comparatively simple subset of the XML 1.0 Recommendation is actually put to use. However, if you start trying some of the more interesting stuff (DTD/Schema, namespaces, XSL etc.), XML can get pretty complex very quickly.
That's what I was talking about. In general I doubt the people who are looking for "experts" in XML are looking for more than those able to store and retrieve data, which was what I had in mind.

[Stephen Philbin]

Yup. That's what drives me crazy. Employers don't know what they need, so they just demand everything. If they don't know what they need, then they should either speak to a consultant or just own up to the fact and state what they need doing, rather than carpet-bombing with trendy acronyms and abbreviations.

The same is true about their demands for experience with specific applications (like Dreamweaver and Photoshop), rather than the area of expertise in which the applications are applied (like Javascript and graphic design). I can understand why experience with a specific application might be requested in the cases where a department or organization has a policy of using that specific application, but it's still shouldn't be listed as a requirement. So long as the person is competent in their field, learning to use a specific application to produce their work should be a trivial matter.