Where do You Stand in the Web Development Industry? Part III
Anyone working in the web development industry for more than a day knows that the learning never stops. There will always be new languages to learn or ways to master the languages you already know. The survey from A List Apart (http://aneventapart NULL.com/alasurvey2010/00 NULL.html) illustrates what skill sets are being used by people in the web development industry and how they go about learning new skills.
Skills Distribution
Like any profession, web development allows you to climb the ladder so to speak in terms of advancement and career development. For example it is common to start out in one area such as web design and development, and as you become more comfortable, branch out into front-end programming, and from there advance into back-end programming. The survey results seem to confirm this progression, as the percentage of respondents who claim to have each skill decreases with the transition from design, to front-end programming to back-end programming.
Back-End Programming Skill Gaps
A respondent is considered to have a skill gap if he or she requires a specific skill or skill set for a job, but doesn’t have it. For example, if you are a web programmer, and you don’t know some type of back-end programming language such as Ruby on Rails or PHP, you would have a back-end programming skill gap. The overall trend illustrated in the survey results shows that with years of experience comes more high-skilled back-end programming experience, and therefore, a smaller percentage of respondents with a skill gap. This is consistent with the notion that people tend to start out learning more design-specific languages and advance to back-end program languages after working in the field for a while.
Image Taken from A List Apart Survey
Front-End Programming Skill Gaps
The results for the skill gaps in front-end programming don’t look much different than the results for back-end programming. The overall skill gap is only 0.4% lower for front-end programming than back-end programming, and the overall trend is the same, in that the skill gap tends to decrease with more years of experience.
Image Taken from A List Apart Survey
CSS Skill Gaps
According to the survey results, the overall skill gap for CSS coding is 6.2%, which is significantly lower than front-end programming and backend programming, which had skill gaps of 18.2% and 18.6% respectively. However the trend shows the same decreasing skill gap as years of experience increases.
Image Taken from A List Apart Survey
What does this mean for you?
Especially if you fall into that self-employed category I wrote about in last week’s blog post, knowing what skills other people in the industry possess can be particularly helpful. Depending on how your skill set compares to the respondents in the survey, you can determine whether or not you need to step up your game to stay competitive, or put yourself at ease knowing you are right on target with the rest of the industry. If you find yourself ahead of the curve, perhaps that gives you just the boost of confidence you need to justify raising your rates or taking on more challenging projects.
If you’re new to the industry and don’t have a clue where to start in web development, the overall trend suggests that starting with a simple markup language such as HTML, XHTML, or XML is the norm. And with good reason. A lot of other more advanced languages require prior knowledge if basic markup languages. However, it’s important to keep in mind that as you progress in your your career you must take on new skill sets so you don’t fall into the skill gap. Which brings me to my next topic, education.
Keeping up with the Jones’s
Contrary to popular belief, web development languages don’t grow on trees. You have to go out of your way to learn new languages and keep up with industry trends. The nice thing about learning when it comes to web development is that you have a choice as to whether you go through formal training or learn on your own.
Given the fast-pace nature of the web development industry, the majority of survey respondents reported they do most of their training by self-study, primarily by reading content that is updated on a regular basis. 96% of respondents reported reading relevant blogs, websites and e-zines to keep up with industry trends. 41% of respondents reported going through formal training in the form of seminars and and conferences.
Well that about wraps up our analysis of the A List Apart Survey findings. Hopefully you were able to take away something useful or interesting. If nothing else, at least you probably have a better idea of how you compare to the general web development public. Until next year!
