CIW Certification - Training Advice Needed

Is CIW Certification Worthwhile? Can you teach yourself?

[Jade22]

Hi,

I currently work as a Web Producer and have been in the industry for the last 3 years or so but feel as though I need to update my knowledge.

I have asked my company to put me through some training and I was wondering if anyone had any advice about the CIW qualification? I was intending to start with the CIW Foundations - has anyone done this through self-study? I have been looking at various training providers but a lot of them are computer based training programmes anyway so I thought I might be better off doing it myself?

Thanks

[RailMan]

CIW will give you a very basic education in a very broad range of topics in a short space of time.
you'll have a good idea of how the various technologies work together or independently, but you will never use half of them and you'll have little *real* knowledge / experience of the ones you do use

as an employer, if i see CIW on your CV, i know you're committed and enthusiastic, but probably don't have strong core skills (ie, you don't have rock solid HTML / CSS / PHP etc) - if you did have strong core skills, you wouldn't have taken CIW ..........

there's no substitute for a degree

next best (in terms of courses) would be something like college courses in programming - learn the *principles* of programming and you can apply them to any programming language - you just need to learn the syntax / structure of the new programming languages

and you can take all the courses in the world, but you still need to show you've learnt something and been able to apply it - i'd like to see CVs with plenty of work demonstrating the skills learnt on the courses

specialisation is also good - concentrate on a couple of core skills that can be used anywhere, anytime - master them - do not become a jack of all trades and master of none ............

[bunltd]

there's no substitute for a degree ... if you did have strong core skills, you wouldn't have taken CIW

Degrees are fine, and may be important to some employers, but they're not magic.

At WebmasterWorld, you've found one of the best places on the web to learn what you need to know, it may take digging, asking questions, but you can't beat the breadth and depth of knowledge to be found here.

Application and demonstrated results are what really matter.

LisaB

[Jade22]

Thanks for the advice.

Basically I'm at the stage where I am doing simple websites for clients using Flash, Dreamweaver, css but I don't know any programming langugage like javascript or anything about php which seems to be becoming more and more popular.

I'm basically more of a web designer and I freelance doing sites for small clients outside of my main job. What is the most useful next step in terms of personal training that I could take?

J