The main thing to emphasise is that the training itself will not make you a web designer; it will merely teach you the methods. As you work on your training course, spend some time to construct & develop a large range of your own sites to create a portfolio of your work. A hobby or other interest is a very good place to start, or perhaps your favourite dog, or a holiday resort you especially loved. Construct an interactive site, and begin generating 'traffic' towards it. Every little thing you do will add to your Curriculum Vitae, & illustrate much more to an employer than an 'Adobe' accreditation.

Validated exam preparation and simulation materials are vital - and should definitely be sought from your course provider. Sometimes people can be thrown off course by practicing questions for their exams that aren't recognised by official boards. Often, the question formats and phraseology can be completely unlike un-authorised versions and you need to be ready for this. Ensure that you request some practice exams that will allow you to verify your understanding whenever you need to. Mock exams add to your knowledge bank - so the actual exam is much easier.

Lots of independent web-site designers can handle a number of these functions by themselves; in fact we come into contact with quite a few who can on a regular basis. It will take time though to acquire such an array of professional competencies. You have to be taught a number of things on a commercially feasible web design training package: First of all, an introduction to basic web-design, followed by teaching in Adobe 'Dreamweaver' & an understanding of the main elements of Adobe 'Flash'. This should then lead on to an understanding of 'HTML' and 'CSS', followed by some training into the field of e-commerce. Some database and 'SEO' knowledge is vital, and an understanding of the programming language PHP (as opposed to the more complex ASP.Net) so that you can construct dynamic websites. All of this is just to get to a level of competence technically whereby you can cope with a wide enough array of web-sites. The physical abilities have to come first of all, before you fine tune them to a natural flowing style - a lot like when you were learning to drive your car. You would need to give yourself something like 400-500 hrs to study and properly grasp a wide-ranging training-program of this nature - so if your aim is to accomplish this along-side full-time work it could be done within one year. An industry expert will be able to help you plan your way through this quagmire of professional training, & we highly recommend that you prepare your path carefully before you begin your web design training.

Commercial certification is now, undoubtedly, already replacing the more academic tracks into the IT industry - why then is this the case? With 3 and 4 year academic degree costs increasing year on year, and the IT sector's increasing awareness that corporate based study is often far more commercially relevant, we have seen a dramatic increase in CISCO, Adobe, Microsoft and CompTIA certified training programmes that educate students at a fraction of the cost and time involved. Academic courses, as a example, clog up the training with a lot of loosely associated study - and a syllabus that's too generalised. This holds a student back from getting enough core and in-depth understanding on a specific area.

The crux of the matter is this: Commercial IT certifications give employers exactly what they're looking for - the title says it all: i.e. I am a 'Microsoft Certified Professional' in 'Designing Security for a Windows 2003 Network'. Consequently companies can identify just what their needs are and what certifications are required to perform the job.

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