We get a lot of people asking us questions for school projects, I can’t answer them all but since I’ve been volunteered to go talk about web design as a career at a local career day, I thought I could use the warm up
1. What are the basic skills required for an entry position?
I get a few resumes every week, if you want me to read it, you usually need to have built a webpage.
2. What is the minimum work experience necessary for this field?
Again, many of our applicants have already built webpages on their own, so you’d be competing against them
3. Where did you get your training or education? Would you recommend your school to me?
I have a math degree from the University of Waterloo, most everyone else has a computer sceince degree from the university of Guelph
4. What is your employed entry level postion (ie. Junior Developer, databases, site administrator)? Are there room for advancements.
Junior Developer, and everyone has a plan for eventual advancement.
5. What do you like best about your job? Why?
I love to build things, the more complicated the project the happier I am.
6. What do you like least about your job?
When customers want to recreate the print experience on the web, with everything absolutley identical across all platforms, which we can do, but it loses some of what makes the web great and flexible.
7. Where do you see Web Design and Development within the next 5 years?
More and more useful, web users are getting used to things that were amazing 10 years ago. I was annoyed at Google last week because it couldn’t tell me what book I was trying to remember from a few bits of trivia (the author has a brother in Toronto for instance).
8. What are the working conditions?
Right now it’s a well-lit open concept office in downtown Guelph.
9. What advice would you give to someone looking to follow in your field?
Get exctied and make things.
10. Other contacts? (references to persons or text related to this field)
(I did answewr this, but I’ll leave it out here)
11. Would hiring practices be based on grades(knowledge retained), school of choice (private/public/upgrading) or experience?
Experience and portfolio, one thing we’ve done is to give small programming tasks on copies of real projects (like to add a contact form).
12. Do you like your job on a whole and would you recommend this field to a programmer with stong computer knowledge.
Yup.
13. Upgrading will be steady once program is complete do you forsee any areas that would be good avenues to persue?
Use the web, and build anything you need but don’t find.
