[Bravo]

In October I am starting a series of 6 Open University courses that will take 3 years or so to complete (due to start times).

This is the course I am taking first: Web applications: design, development and management

A little about it:

[St0rm[TitE]]

looks good. what is the cost though?

[Bravo]

[Nick(NR)]

Good luck to you bravo, I did look at the web design and compliance standards one for myself, but decided against it as I feel I now a fair bit to hand code a design in notepad alone tbh, so it seemed a waste to pay out to learn most of what I already know and for what I don't there's always people on some forums I go to that do.

[Bravo]

Thanks Nick, the one I am doing is sort of entry level (apart from the one designed for people that dont even know how to copy and paste etc), but there are another 5 courses after this, if you are considering it, you could go for one of those, you get letters after your name at the end  

I decided against the Diploma in IT course, the letters you got after your name for that one was 'Dip IT'  

[admin (no pm's please)]

I have mixed feelings about courses, I have been largely self-taught, in fact I was even daft enough to drop out of a degree course in maths and computing at least partially on the grounds the computing side was so lame compared to what I knew  

I still think that course was really flawed in not picking up on peoples current abilities, but I did come to realize that there was actually a heck of a lot I did not know   and that even if you do think you know it all, a structured course can still both fill in the odd gap and impart the confidence that what you know is reasonably comprehensive in a field.

When you are self taught there are almost always some painful gaps... then again when I think of what I'm coding right now in terms of web programming, it is actually well outside of the official howtodoit box   and that in of itself does fit my own self taught career pattern. I can think of a large number of incidents where I have rejected how things are meant to be done and have had the confidence to go my own way  

I suppose ultimately you should learn by whatever means you can, taking whatever opportunities there are. I believe a lot in books on that score as well, I reread one today and learned properly bits I had missed on first reading, and picked up code that will be part of a new myff service shortly.

[St0rm[TitE]]

good points there.

good luck to Bravo doing the course. thing with a recognised course is that you get a certificate at the end of it which looks good on your CV.

being self taught means you dont.

having said that, in 1998 i brought a pentium 2 windows 98 tower and learnt everything myself from scratch (been a console boy, last computer id touched was a commodore amiga). i then went onto windows 2000 and then xp.

laptop overheating problems aside, my xp is almost instant in anything i do as ive learned off my own back which proccesss to stop and basically whats needed and what isnt. a self streamlined OS by myself without reading other peoples so called tips off google. my firefox is also running like a bullet thanks to the tinkering that can be done on it that cant on IE7.

but ive got no certificate for what ive learned...

[admin (no pm's please)]

[Bravo]

Many employers today get lots of applications from total no-hopers who appear to live on cloud cuckoo land (I've interviewed some of them, one was so out of it on drugs he fell asleep during the interview), so they tend to have a system of chucking as many of these out as possible before they get to the interview stage.  A cut off is very likely to be a qualification bar, where someone who has an NVQ (Not Very Qualified) would get through, where someone who has 20 years self taught would not.

I personally think it is laziness on the part of the people doing the interviewing, in that they can't be bothered to actually try to find out the real person behind each application, and thus end up with a bunch of space cadets working for them while the real quality people are stuck trying to apply for something else instead.

One of those things that is broke, and only a multitude of individuals doing the right thing can fix it.

Me personally, I need a proper organised structure to my learning, or I end up just learning the bits I am more interested in.  When I put my mind to it I am more than capable of picking stuff up, I just find something else to do instead  

The OU is excellent at giving opportunity to all regardless of past mistakes, you don't need to be able to afford it either, they'll help you out if needed, looking forward to it