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Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
November/December 2004 | Home

Employment News: Updating Your Web Skills
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Mel Coxby Mel Cox
EBSTC Co-Manager of Employment

 

This is supposed to be the “Jobs” column, and not the “Education” column, but since many of us are finding ourselves increasingly shut out from job opportunities because we lack some of the newer skills demanded by employers, I'd like to talk about educational opportunities in this issue.

The following requirements were included for a technical writer position in a recent posting on Craigslist:

  • Demonstrated ability to develop websites; extensive knowledge of HTML and CSS.
  • Experience developing web applications using one or more of the following technologies: JSP, ASP, .NET, CFML, PHP.

As our speaker, Bryan Allo, pointed out in his talk at October’s meeting, "The Web Skills You Need to Know," these new technologies are rapidly becoming necessary knowledge and skills for technical writers. The question is where are you going to acquire these new skills? Many public and private colleges offer courses in these new technologies. Those that are public are usual reasonably priced, but may require you to attend over a period of years. Others that are private may offer a faster paced course, but the price is often in the thousands of dollars plus the cost of textbooks.

Fortunately, we in the East Bay have an alternative to both of these possibilities. While unemployed, I recently attended and completed two nine-week sessions offered by the Contra Costa County Office of Education in their Regional Occupation Program (ROP) Adult Programs.

I learned Dreamweaver (an HTML editor), Fireworks (a web graphics application), Flash (a web animation application) and HTML (the underlying code for the web).

The cost was a $45 dollar lab fee, plus the cost of the various textbooks (about $40 to $50 each). Also offered were PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), ColdFusion (allows database development and searching on the web) and ASP (allows database development and searching on the web). The instruction and the equipment were first rate, and equal to any of the best public or private colleges.

These programs are approved by the state of California Employment Development Department (EDD), and if you become enrolled while collecting unemployment compensation, you are exempt from having to seek employment. Additionally, in many cases, attendance in this class will cause your unemployment benefits to be extended for the duration of your attendance.

More information about this program and other adult ROP courses can be found at the Contra Costa County Office of Education and the Regional Occupational Program's Technology Center.

 

  

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