Colleges do a poor job preparing students for careers designing Web sites or for related positions in Web development, often because they teach out-of-date curricula and fail to hire instructors with recent experience in the field, according to a survey of top Web designers and developers.
The survey, “Teach the Web,” was culled from interviews with 32 prominent Web designers and developers. Many of them said that colleges often forgo teaching the fundamentals of making Web sites in favor of teaching narrow skills like Flash and Photoshop, leaving students unprepared for getting a job.
“I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them,” said James Archer, chief executive of Forty Agency, a branding firm. “Most of the time, they’ve been brought a long way down the wrong path.”
The author of the survey, Leslie Jensen-Inman, an assistant professor of art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wrote in A List Apart magazine that instructors at colleges must do a better job keeping up with the fast-changing standards of the Internet. She encouraged Web-design professionals to do more outreach to local colleges and offer discounts to educators at professional training and networking conferences.
Other recommendations to colleges from the survey: require students to do internships; revise course content more frequently; and drop requirements that instructors must have a graduate-level degree to be hired.—Josh Keller
