For almost all web designers, Adobe Dreamweaver is the starting point of study. It’s reputed to be the most used web-development environment in the world.

The complete Adobe Web Creative Suite additionally should be understood in-depth. This will educate you in Flash and Action Script, amongst others, and could lead on to the Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) or Adobe Certified Professional (ACP) certification.

Constructing a website is merely a fraction of what’s needed – to drive traffic, update content, and work with dynamic database-driven sites, you’ll be required to have additional programming skills, namely ones like HTML, PHP and MySQL. You should also gain a working knowledge of E-Commerce and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Wouldn’t it be great to know for sure that our careers are secure and our work futures are protected, but the growing reality for most jobs around the UK today seems to be that security may be a thing of the past.

We can however hit upon security at market-level, by looking for high demand areas, mixed with a shortage of skilled staff.

The computer industry skills shortage across the UK falls in at roughly twenty six percent, as shown by a recent e-Skills survey. Put directly, we can’t properly place more than just 3 out of each four job positions in IT.

This one truth alone underpins why the UK needs many more trainees to join the IT industry.

We can’t imagine if a better time or market conditions could exist for getting certified in this swiftly emerging and developing market.

The way in which your courseware is broken down for you is usually ignored by most students. How many parts is the training broken down into? What is the specific order and at what speed is it delivered?

You may think that it makes sense (with most training taking 1-3 years to achieve full certification,) for a training company to release a single section at a time, as you complete each part. However:

What would happen if you didn’t finish every section at the proposed pace? Often the prescribed exam order doesn’t work as well as an alternative path could be.

To be honest, the very best answer is to get an idea of what they recommend as an ideal study order, but make sure you have all of your learning modules right from the beginning. Meaning you’ve got it all in case you don’t finish within their ideal time-table.

The somewhat scary thought of securing your first role in IT is often made easier by training colleges, through a Job Placement Assistance programme. Don’t get overly impressed with this service – it’s easy for their marketing department to overplay it. The fact of the matter is, the need for well trained IT people in the UK is what will enable you to get a job.

However, what is relevant is to have help and assistance with preparing a CV and getting interviews though; and we’d recommend everybody to bring their CV up to date as soon as training commences – don’t delay till you’ve finished your exams.

Various junior support jobs have been bagged by trainees who are still studying and haven’t even passed a single exam yet. This will at least get your CV into the ‘possible’ pile and not the ‘no’ pile.

If you don’t want to travel too far to work, then you’ll probably find that a specialist locally based employment agency might serve you better than a centralised service, because they’re going to know local employment needs.

A big frustration of many training companies is how hard trainees are prepared to study to get top marks in their exams, but how little effort that student will then put into getting the role they have acquired skills for. Don’t give up when the best is yet to come.

Commercially accredited qualifications are now, undoubtedly, already replacing the traditional routes into the IT industry – why then should this be?

As we require increasingly more effective technological know-how, industry has of necessity moved to the specialised core-skills learning that can only be obtained from the actual vendors – for example companies like Microsoft, CompTIA, CISCO and Adobe. This frequently provides reductions in both cost and time.

In essence, the learning just focuses on what’s actually required. It isn’t quite as lean as that might sound, but the principle remains that students need to concentrate on the fundamentally important skill-sets (along with a certain amount of crucial background) – without overdoing the detail in every other area (as universities often do).

The bottom line is: Commercial IT certifications give employers exactly what they’re looking for – everything they need to know is in the title: for example, I am a ‘Microsoft Certified Professional’ in ‘Planning and Maintaining a Windows 2003 Infrastructure’. So an employer can look at the particular needs they have and which qualifications are required to perform the job.