[thelist] Hiring Eye Opener - Web Skills Testing (long)

Alastair Murdoch alastair at cubeit.co.uk
Tue Feb 26 08:17:00 CST 2002


none of this surprises me, given the standard of some of the local colleges
work I've seen.

Given that I learned most of my web knowledge from books or sites like
evolt, and that my background was engineering, looking for standards and
'correct' ways of doing things was the first thing I did, using css instead
of font tags etc etc. were all this I picked up by reading, evaluating and
listening to other peoples opinions. I reckoned that this knowledge would
help give some validity (no pun intended) to my skills when apply for
positions, given that I had no formal web design education.

As it happens I couldn't have been more wrong and ended up setting up in
partnership with a friend to do design and development work ourselves.

<rant>
Over the course of the last year, we've had students from the local college
come to us looking for work, yet the only way they've been taught to design
is with the layer tools in dreamweaver. We've had designers who believe the
web is nothing more than sliced up photoshop, seen more bad flash than you
can shake a stick at, yet all these people have got qualifications and have
got jobs doing web design that I couldn't get because I didn't 'do' web
design.
</rant>

I'm not annoyed at the people per say, it's how they've been taught. The
general attitude that web design it still 'easy', no-one seems to be
teaching what HTML *IS* and how to use it correctly.

To be honest, the test sounds fair, you could have been a lot more awkward
and tricky with the questions, someone with a qualifications or good
experience should have been able to answer all of those, I did :)

I'd second the olly's brainbech suggestion, go take the html 3.2 test (it's
free) and see how you think it compares.

cheers

alastair





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