Foreign Perspectives

In computing you’re constantly on a treadmill to keep up with the latest technologies.

That’s not so bad if your employer has been good enough to keep you on some kind of development programme but, of course, these days fewer employers are willing or able to afford to do that. Not only do they have the perennial problem that you might up sticks and move on right after an expensive training programme but there’s the added problem of financing it in these difficult economic times.

Usually these courses cost an absolute fortune so paying for them yourself isn’t an option. However, there are a number of more affordable versions of some of these around these days including fairly general ones like those on Java and Visual Basic through to rather more specific (and quickly dating) ones like Microsoft server technologies all for around £400 for a course running over nine months. Where you get into bigger bucks is in the networking courses with CISCO networking at £850 (albeit a rather larger course than the earlier ones) and Advanced routing at £1250.

Sadly the best all-rounder, a suite of six courses that make up the Certificate in Web Applications Development is just about to commence its final run. This was one of the experimental formats designed to be easily updated which seemingly wasn’t nearly so easy to update as anticipated (ie they probably lost a fortune on it). What’s interesting about this one is that whilst the later modules received a fair amount of criticism, the websites that the students produced are rather good.