As the Web continues to evolve, tools for creating, posting and maintaining content get more complex. Acronyms abound and job posting for "web masters" have turned into laundry lists of technologies, software and infrastructures that'll make most anyone's head spin.
Do students really need to master each and every technology and build "graduate level" skills before they feel "employable"? Thankfully, the set of "future-web" skills needed for the web-savvy worker of tomorrow requires something totally different - the ability to seek out, analyze, and learn (many times teaching yourself) new technologies and new techniques.
I live right in the heart of Silicon Valley, a place where you can throw a rock and hit three or four engineers, programmers, or web designers. Stand on a ladder (a tall one) outside my house and you can see 6 colleges. Apple, HP, MSFT, Intel and others are right around the corner. It's easy in this area to find someone who claims to know pieces of the "web acronym alphabet". They each have skills, mostly self-taught or gained from recent courses, in different areas and components of web front- or back-end infrastructure. Few know most of them an an operational level. None know them all.
What many of these talented people lack, however, is the ability to problem-solve and to adapt to the ever-changing technologies presented by advances in the pipeline, interface and functionality of the web. Tomorrow's web designers must have both a catalog of code snippets and a catalog of places and people they can tap to learn or keep abreast of new technologies.
Future-web skills for "coders" and for "maintainers" are changing at an equally rapid pace. Web 2.0 and the rise of social networking sites and media are changing the face of the web and, interestingly enough, are shifting focus from technologies (which are quite complex, but done by "someone else") to content. Maintaining a website now may include posting and managing a blog, wiki, mashup, podcast network, RSS feed or virtual environment.
So what's a student to do who wants to learn web design today and practice it tomorrow? The answer, in short, is:
* keep abreast of new developments
* teach yourself new technologies and learn how to learn others
* get really good at the basics (raw HTML/CSS)
* build your communication skills - both speaking and writing
* practice obsessively - build your own sites or sites for friends.
Focus on these and your success rate will rocket higher. Ignore these and you'll watch everyone around you succeed, while you sit wondering what's wrong.
I'm off to figure out the GUI for my next back-end SQL DB...
Bard
