Career Help

Disco Bandit

So my wife has been feeling lost for a while. She has a master's degree in Education, but after a year of working as a teacher decided it wasn't for her. She worked every night when she got home trying to design the perfect lessons, just really burnt herself out being too good of a teacher. Sounds weird, but she was putting in 60-70 hours a week as an elementary school teacher. Anyway, she's currently working a low-paying clerical job while she figures out what she wants to do.

She's designed two websites before, using google's website creation tool. She loved it. She's looking into online classes/certifications for web design. I am encouraging her in this, but neither one of us know much about the process of becoming a web site designer. Does she need a 2 or 4 year degree in computer science or something? She found this, which she is interested in: http://www.gatlineducation.com/webmaster.html . How feasible is this program? Are there certain certificates and/or associates degrees that are better than others? Any help or advice on the subject would be great.

Skoal Cat

Has she thought about informal education opportunities, such as museum work?

MagicToaster

With some exceptions, such as working inhouse for a large company or ad agency, you dont really need anything beyond knowledge and skills to work as a designer. However, not that I said designer and not web designer. I would advise her to first get a very solid grasp as to what graphic design is and throughout the process focus on how these things apply to web. There are lots of two year courses she could do, but I wouldnt advice her to go for a comp sci degree. A graphic design degree will include what you need to know to start a web designer career.

I would also try to get her an internship somewhere so she can have practical experience and a taste of what the industry is like. This way, she will know if its still for her when the deadlines and the pressure start to roll in.

Derrick

MagicToaster wrote:

With some exceptions, such as working inhouse for a large company or ad agency, you dont really need anything beyond knowledge and skills to work as a designer. However, not that I said designer and not web designer. I would advise her to first get a very solid grasp as to what graphic design is and throughout the process focus on how these things apply to web. There are lots of two year courses she could do, but I wouldnt advice her to go for a comp sci degree. A graphic design degree will include what you need to know to start a web designer career.

I would also try to get her an internship somewhere so she can have practical experience and a taste of what the industry is like. This way, she will know if its still for her when the deadlines and the pressure start to roll in.

I'd be careful about this. Make sure the Design courses have a strong web component to them, and stay away from places like ITT Tech and Devry. There are colleges out there with awesome print design courses and only so-so web ones, and the website design is really what you want to be marketable.

The great thing about website design is that it isn't difficult to learn. You can actually start figuring out the basics right now without anything more than notepad. Things like this- http://how-to-build-websites.com/ are all over the web.

Now, a word of warning. Web design is quite different from print design in that the technology for website design (like dreamweaver) isn't really up to par to print design software (like photoshop & illustrator) in terms of ease-of-use to profession output. To be a competent web designer you're going to have to know code and how it works.

MichaelLC

Derrick wrote:

Now, a word of warning. Web design is quite different from print design in that the technology for website design (like dreamweaver) isn't really up to par to print design software (like photoshop & illustrator) in terms of ease-of-use to profession output. To be a competent web designer you're going to have to know code and how it works.

To some degree, definitely. Certainly more than print work like you said.

I'd add though that the coding is probably the easy part - the hard part is the 'Designer' of Web Designer. Knowing about colors, and layout, and human interface design. Then knowing how to make that work within the tech limits.

So if she's serious about it, be familiar with coding and the basics, but I would send more time on the 'soft' side of it, as that will make her stand out more.

Esh

Also, she should be aware that graphic design/web design is a positively glutted field.

finral

I'll say this about teaching, if she wanted to try it again. It gets a lot easier with time. After a couple years, you have tons of lesson plans ready to go already, as well as a better ability to come up with things off the cuff.